Howdy - Just completed my 3rd race and noticed the winner had an average HR of 103bpm. It was a race where HRM was required. I thought that would have been flagged?
I’m a bit confused on how the rules work.
On another note - I’d think this would be easier if result points were used (like traditional racing) rather than w/kg metrics.
HRM’s play up sometimes. The few times I have sourced HR from a watch for example, it wouldnt go above 110bpm and thats simply because me and optical HRM’s dont work well together when I sweet (edit: sweat)
If no HRM was used (ie, ZP didnt see any data) then he/she would be DQ’ed.
The other thing you should consider is the persons history - have a look through ZP what performances they have put on inthe past. If they have suddenly lost weight and moved rom D to A then you can and probably should report them, but when I look at this person, I see a consistent Cat B performance record and only one other time when the HR appeared glitchy.
@Robert_Darrow, you are quite right. Not only would it be easier, but also better, more logical, better for the community etc etc to go with a results-based category system instead. Unfortunately, the Zwift management was gifted with neither analytic skills nor common sense. So we’re still stuck with the stupid W/kg system which, as we all know, doesn’t work well at all.
You are also quite right in pointing out that not considering HR is weird if you are to persist with the W/kg system. My suggestion is you have a look at the winner’s race history. Is that really his first win?
I could show you many horror examples of people with absurd win rates and low avg HR. Zwift pulled the link between ZwiftPower and ZHQ racer profiles a couple of months ago, but before they did it was even more blatantly obvious that some riders deliberately underperform to win an unfair amount of races in a lower category than their true capacity. And it all looks completely legit! At least until you start looking at… HR.
Does it really work, to win races by underperforming? Yes, it works. I have tried myself. But then you get showered with the mandatory counter-arguments. HRM’s don’t always work. Some people deviate from the norm in max HR, so you can’t judge them. And yada yada. Yeah… right… It doesn’t change the fact that there are cruisers out there for real. I could link some profiles but have decided never to do that, and here comes the reason…
Note that it isn’t cheating to underperform and win more than half of your races. It is unfair. I don’t like it. (Who does?) It ruins Zwift racing. But it isn’t cheating because there are no rules against it. Actually, the current category system promotes it. So I argue that you should cruise too. It can’t be up to the subscribers to save Zwift racing with some vaguely defined moral standard that we make up ourselves. It should be Zwift designing a working category system instead, one where this behavior is not possible or at least not rewarded (a results-based system insta-kills all forms of sandbagging). But Zwift isn’t working on a new system. Nor will they. So please go ahead and cruise. Zwift racing is broken as is anyway, it makes no difference whatsoever.