Light Riders not part of Zwift

This is a continued discussion from this thread, where I showed proof of discrepancies on ZwiftPower between cat A on the one hand and cat B-D on the other with regards to race effort. Later on we also found funny things about rider weight.

To sum up the thread, I showed that:
-Cat A winners work harder than the rest of the podium
-Cat B-D winners work less hard than the rest of the podium
-The difference is not random
-The results suggests strong presence of cruising in cat B-D but not in A (where you can’t cruise)

I also showed that:
-Cat C podium winners weigh more than other race participants in races in general
-The difference is not random

The above differences, I argued, are caused by the current W/kg category system that gives advantages to:
a) Sandbaggers (cheaters)
b) Cruisers (cheaters)
c) Relatively heavy riders (not cheaters)

The reasons why the W/kg cat system gives unfair advantages to sandbaggers, cruisers and relatively heavy riders is because of its unique and ill-chosen features compared to category/division systems in basically any other sport, specifically it’s caused by:
i) No category enforcement
ii) Past race Watts determine category rather than past race results
iii) A performance ceiling in cat B-D that will lead to DQ in a race if reached

I also argued there is a Light Rider’s Curse, i.e. that there is a tendency for light riders to sooner get upgraded rather than get anywhere near a podium in cat B-D. You reach the top of your category in terms of W/kg, you still lose, and then you get upgraded to the bottom of the next category.

Why would that be? Let’s theorycraft. It’s because someone doing 300W is going faster on the flat than someone doing 275W.

“Duuuhh, of course he is! So what?”

Well, what if it’s a cat C race and the guy doing 300W weighs 94 kg? That’s 3.19 W/kg. And what if the guy doing 275W weighs 77 kg? That’s 3.57 W/kg. See the problem?

The heavy guy wins the race and the light guy isn’t anywhere near a podium but is still a disgusting sandbagger who deserves a DQ. But this never happens in real-world cycling, only in Zwift. And it’s because of the W/kg cat system that no other sport uses.

So in theory our cat system gives an unfair advantage to a heavier rider. I also showed with data that this is indeed so, looking at averages over a mix of races including not only flat races but also hilly races and even some races with tough climbs.

“But what if there are alternative explanations? What if the winners are just smarter and race better?”

So the heavier riders would have extra brain cells that the others don’t? Like… in the love handles?

“Ok, maybe not exactly smarter in general. But what if the winners simply draft better or were just lucky to be in draft more than the others for whatever reason?”

It’s a fair question, I think. @Paul_Smith_1948_HERD came with a suggestion:

Maybe a separate dataset for ITTs? That would eliminate the effects of drafting.

So I did a new study. 40 iTT races in cat C taken from yesterday and backwards in time according to ZP. What were the average weights for the podium vs the rest of the field? Was there a difference? And was it statistically significant (i.e. not random)?

Results for iTT’s in cat C
Podium avg weight: 83.9 kg
Losers avg weight: 78.1 kg
Difference: 5.8 kg
Statistical significance: p=0.00004 (probability of a random sample/event resulting in such a difference)
Conclusion: The difference is not random. In fact, a pharma company doing a study on a new promising medication would do wheelies and bring out the champagne if getting results of this magnitude. So heavier riders do have an advantage in cat C, even in iTT’s where there is no draft.

“Ok, but maybe this is exclusive to cat C. I don’t care about the fat noobs in cat C anyway. I race in B.”

So let’s look at cat B too.

Results for iTT’s in cat B
Podium avg weight: 77.7 kg
Losers avg weight: 73.0 kg
Difference: 4.7 kg
Statistical significance: p=0.00007
Conclusion: The difference is not random. We can see that people weigh less in cat B, just as I predicted in this blog post btw, but there is still a clear advantage for the relatively heavier rider, even without draft.

“Uh-oh… and you mean the reason for this is that both cat C and cat B have a performance ceiling (3.2 W/kg and 4.0 W/kg) that will weed out lighter riders trying to match the speed of heavier riders?”

Exactly!

“A-ha! Gotcha! But cat A doesn’t have a performance ceiling! So if their iTT winners are heavier than the losers too, then your argument implodes!”

Yes, you’re right. It would. We’d have to come up with some other explanation for the differences. Not that I can think of any. But let’s worry about that later. First let’s look at cat A the same way. If we see the same difference, then I’m in trouble. However, if we don’t see the same difference… then the W/kg cat system is in trouble. If I lose, I’ll go jump off a bridge. If the W/kg cat system loses then… it can go jump off a bridge.

Results for iTT’s in cat A
Podium avg weight: 68.8 kg
Losers avg weight: 69.9 kg
Difference: -1.1 kg
Statistical significance: p=0.18
Conclusion: There is a small difference, but it’s pointing in the other direction and it is quite possibly just random. We’d get a difference like this almost every 1 in 5 samples from the ZP database. So we conclude that there is no difference in weights between podiums and losers in cat A iTT’s. Neither heavier nor lighter riders have an unfair advantage in cat A.

Q.E.D. The Light Rider’s Curse is real. Now where’s that bridge? I’ll take you there.

I have tried. I have really tried. But I can’t think of anything positive to say about the W/kg cat system whatsoever. It just sucks any way you look at it.

13 Likes

Andreas thank you for the great explanation and explains why I am now a B (3.49 @ 77kg). I have never thought of myself as a B class rider and was surprised when I was upgraded. In truth this has changed my experience with racing on Zwift to a sense of why bother as it is difficult for me to compete as a B cat (No I don’t expect to win but it would be nice to even be mid pack). It would seem by getting lighter Zwift is actually punishing you which seems counterintuitive for a cycling/fitness app.
Live in hope that a change to the w/kg system does happen.
Cheers.

4 Likes

All I can say is, “Wow!” This pretty well nails it. I can’t do the math (dysgraphia) but I respect it.

I should say that chatter in our Facebook group tends to confirm the cruising aspect. Mostly it’s that people don’t want to be bottom 10 in, say, B when they’ve been top 10 in C. (This is academic for me: my 60-minute FTP is heart-rate constrained to Cat D, barring a 20kg weight loss).

I would point out that in pro cycling there are relative disadvantages for heavier riders on climbs and lighter riders on flats. There are exceptions, too. More trained muscle => more power to the tires with nearly the same coefficient of drag but more muscle => more mass to haul uphill. Of course, these people are all very fit: nothing at all like the extra 4kg of flab I’ve packed on since May.

I know your thesis is that Zwift should use past results rather than w/kg to set racing categories. How should Zwift handle new and developing riders who don’t have a sufficient body of data?

I doubt you can eliminate sandbagging - look at golf - but you can make this more fair.

1 Like

O there are many options.

Have qualifying races
Open the E category to new riders for every race
Use all rider data including training and free riding (best guess of FTP and assign a cat)

There need to be serious races and open races.

With a proper race ranking system a sandbagger have to finish outside of the top 10 to avoid moving up and if they are happy to do that then they wont influence the race.

3 Likes

If a rider’s race ranking put them just under the next category, should they get a podium for the effort that pushes them into it or be DQ’d/Reclassed?

I’m not asking for a friend that this won’t happen to me because I’m a TTT racer, captaining a developmental team.

I would say if a rider start in the correct category then hes should get the win. That mean Zwift will have to put people in the correct starting pen.
then after the race the rider will be reclassified.

In fact I think Race categories should be dynamic. So you will have a ranking number and 1 min before the start Zwift will calculate the size of the field and the strength of the field then group riders in 1 to 10 starting groups. This way you could some days be top of the group or the bottom. This will add some randomness to racing and more potential to be competitive.

@Gerrie_Delport is right here. You should NEVER disqualify a rider that you yourself let into a race for the reason that he turned out too strong and shouldn’t have been let in (that’s on you). Not only is it unfair and counter-intuitive, but it also creates enormous problems by giving new incentives to cheating (cruising).If you’re too strong for a cat, then you’re no fun for the rest of the pack and you should be upgraded. But you do that only after a race, in between races. You don’t invalidate a result because it was “too good”. And you can’t have performance ceilings in sports. It kills the sport.

Gerries idea about dynamic categories… I like it. As long as we don’t have formal seasons in Zwift, and I doubt we’ll ever see any (zwifters around the globe have such different needs and time tables), then all people really care about is joining a race for fun and fitness and hopefully get a good result. They don’t care what goes on in the other 30 races that day. You still want cross-race comparisons between riders? Ok, you can have a rider ranking and it can be more or less visible. For bragging rights and epeens on the forum maybe. Other than that it’s each race you participate in that is important to everyone. So dynamic categories would be just fine. I’m sure people would be happy with them. Happier.

As for the initial seeding problem, @Paul_Smith_1948_HERD, there are several options, like Gerrie said. One of them is indeed W/kg, but from your overall activities and not only past races. The W/kg categories are useful for non-race group events. Not perfect but quite decent. So you could look at the span of W/kg for a given category and put a new rider in what seems to correspond the best to any of the results-based categories, leaning towards a lower category (since W/kg spans will overlap between categories). But it doesn’t play well with dynamic categories.

In some online games you have calibration games before you get a ranking and categorization. So you would need a few races for Zwift to detect your true abilities and those calibration races would be a little shaky. “Ooops! B was way too high for this guy, let’s try C next race” sort of. Might be best to do like Gerrie also suggests and offer an open category in races, F(?), where anyone can join and then if you’re new (or just want to sandbag a little) you pick that one, do the best you can, stay on the fastest wheel you can keep up with, and then your finish time gets compared to riders in all the other categories. In which of the other categories would you fit in best? After a few such calibration races they pin a category on you, say C, and from then on you can only join C races and F races. That should work, no?

@Paul_Smith_1948_HERD wrote:

I should say that chatter in our Facebook group tends to confirm the cruising aspect. Mostly it’s that people don’t want to be bottom 10 in, say, B when they’ve been top 10 in C. (This is academic for me: my 60-minute FTP is heart-rate constrained to Cat D, barring a 20kg weight loss).

Well congratulations! You’re confined to the only category where every other category can come in and sandbag or cruise and ruin your races. In B only A riders can exploit the cat system so it’s a little tidier. D has it worst of all and can’t even take their frustration out on anyone else. And there is even a tendency (not always true though) for riders in higher categories to not care that much about what goes on in D. But it’s unfair. And D is a substantial part of the subscriber base. It’s very important revenue for Zwift.

2 Likes

Yup. That’s D for you, although WTRL has developed its own controls for the TTT. Since my “regular” Zwifting is split between workouts and leading rides at 1.2 and 1.5 w/kg, going through my history would have me sandbagging at 2.2 w/kg.

@Paul_Smith_1948_HERD, WTRL is an interesting approach. Or should I say necessary? I haven’t quite yet wrapped my head around the rules and what they imply with regards to the things we are discussing here, but it seems to me you could get around at least some of the W/kg cat problems by mixing categories like that in the teams. I’m just a tad worried there might be better combos and worse in the teams (a new study perhaps? jk). Optimal strategies like… But hey, it’s a voluntary league and not a rule set anyone is forced to accept, as opposed to the W/kg system. Seems like good fun too.

Running a successful TTT team within the “normal” categories is impossible without weight doping or ridculously selective drafts to the team. If weights differ within the team and the heaviest guy is on the W/kg limit, then the lighter members will either drop or go above limit. You can’t keep together a team with mixed weights over a season without losing races or losing members to upgrades due to the W/kg cat sytem. Hence why something like WTRL had to be invented, at least the way I see it.

Like I have written elsewhere, for a while early in the TTT hype, I saw entire teams where everyone weighed exactly 100 kg. Easy maths in the saddle. Nice round numbers. If it’s cat D, don’t stay above 100 x 2.5 = 250W. If it’s cat C the maths is 100 x 3.2 = 320W. And several of them were known cruisers of course (known to me at least). Neither of them actually weighed 100 kg but rather 90-something, I would say. At least that’s been their weight since and even before in some cases.

And they still cruise solo today at modest Watts.
And they still do outdoor rides on Strava at speeds I could only wish for.
And they still podium far more than their fair share on Zwift.
And they still humble brag about Zwift wins on social media.
And the whole thing still pisses me off.
And most Zwifters still don’t see what is actually going on beneath the surface in almost every random weekday race. They just see the sandbagger flying off the front at start - the ideal decoy to draw attention off the other half of the problem in Zwift racing. The cruisers.
So it’s still like I have to prove their existence. Scientifically, sort of. Which is completely preposterous when you think of it. But here we are.

To some extent I can understand it though. I used to be there too. I just couldn’t get why I got dropped so hard on the Legsnapper as a fairly light rider close to the upper cat limit. I talked to a guy who happens to be a coach. “Hmm, maybe you need to work more on your VO2Max.” I don’t blame him but it is a very convenient answer. Today I know why I got dropped so hard. And I know how to drop people hard on the Legsnapper. I have tried myself. It works. It’s easy.

I get where you’re coming from but I must beg to differ on TTT in some - but not all - respects. If you found a team made up entirely of 100 kg members, that’s what you found. My experience is that what counts in TTT is management of the draft. Teamwork trumps individual performance, at least in the WTRL coffee categories.

Ideally in a TTT, my power graph will be mostly green and yellow with red peaks when I’m pulling. If there were a TEAM power graph, ideally it would be all red as the members stitch their pulls together. Ideally. My overall effort will be less, but my my time far better than I could achieve on my own.

I have admittedly anecdotal evidence based on a WiFi drop-out mid race. I hit a near-all time high in what Today’s Plan calls “Short Endurance” trying to keep up while pedaling offline. But when when WiFi came back and the Riders Near Me panel re-populated, my team was 30 seconds ahead and accelerating away. In a well-matched team, the draft is everything.

One of our longtime members was far stronger than his D rating would indicate. But that was NOT because he was sandbagging or cruising but rather that his only racing was TTT and he was a team player. He WAS a sweeper on group rides, which means his strength was in intervals. Those, as you know, don’t necessary appear in ZwiftPower 95% computations. As soon as he started individual races, he bumped up to upper C. Sandbagger-cheater? Nope. Cruiser? Only by definition.

I should add, however, that the light rider problem is very much an issue in TTT.

Well, maybe Club 100 was bad drafters. This was early on, which might have explained the lack of experience. But let’s also not forget that they didn’t actually need the draft since they ran at overcapacity. They can’t exactly have been gasping for air in their TTT’s.

I’m sorry to say this, but your longtime member was technically a cruiser. Even I may be a cruiser in the eyes of someone who goes harder than me. Intent makes no difference.

I know of people who are cruising to get easy wins.

I myself cruise openly to show that it is possible and to draw attention to the phenomenon since many still are completely oblivious and only see the sandbaggers who they badmouth.

Yet others have no intention to cheat but at the same time people have wildly varying preferences for how a race should be run. Some expect a race to be hard and don’t question the need to go high orange, because they are who they are and also because that’s how they slowly worked themselves up to the W/kg cat limit, by trying to stick to a fast wheel, pushing themselves, working on fitness in races. To some others a low yellow or even green 40 min race near cat limit is perfectly normal, it’s how you race. I think they’re pansies but my opinion doesn’t matter at all here. What matters here is that at cat limit a preference for light efforts will always have an advantage over someone with a preference for working hard. The cruiser won’t always win but would you rather push up the Legsnapper in zone 4 or 5 than in zone 3 if your life depended on winning the race? Cruising is easy.

Meeting the other kind of racer forces the hard workers into a choice. Either they get upgraded without ever seeing a podium or they stay in category while knowing full well that they are able to do an FTP or ramp test that indicates a higher race category. So these varying preferences doesn’t quite mean that there is a true choice in any given category. You can’t quite choose to be a hard worker and expect to do very well in Zwift races. Your chances are much better if you decide to go easy.

So put to the extreme it’s a choice between losing and going easy. No, it’s not like that all the time, but the tendency is there as a logical consequence of our cat system and I have proved it in data too. Cruising is not a guaranteed free ticket to wins, it’s an advantage, it’s better odds. All else equal and on average over several races, the cruisers would do better. And they do.

And the thing is it’s not like this in any other sport. You don’t give free advantages to those who prefer to work less hard than others. And given a results-based cat system the cruisers would instantly cease to exist, also by definition.

So since intent doesn’t matter when it comes to cruising, since it doesn’t matter whether you’re a complete #&$ who want to cheat yourself into wins, or some annoying whistleblowing attention seeking self-appointed knight of Justice who cruises because the thinks it’s wrong, or just some regular guy who prefers to not go too hard in races, going after individuals is the wrong approach. And I actually think the same about sandbaggers. Cuss them all you want on forums or in races but the fact is that they are allowed to sandbag. They are doing nothing wrong. It’s the system that is wrong. Enforce categories and they’re gone. Scrap the W/kg cat system and the cruising is gone too. It’s that easy.

Ah, my apologies. I’ve been coming from my personal perspective, which is that I race once a week for the camaraderie of TTT. Racing is small part of Zwifting for me. Today I led a 90-minute ride advertised at 1.0-1.3 w/kg and I came in marginally above my planned 1.2. That would certainly qualify as cruising, as would the four workouts on my calendar for the week.

But your intent is to scrap w/kg-based race categories and your arguments are sound. I’m not so sure about the labeling.

Nothing outside racing is cruising, ever. A cat B joining your rides as recovery isn’t cruising.

But I really don’t buy the excuse “Oh, you know, I just joined this race as recovery, I sat at the back [omitted: of the front group] the whole time, I promise, except maybe for a few seconds right at the finish where I stretched my legs a little, no harm done”. That’s intentional sandbagging and it ruins races.

Yes, the labeling is harsh when it hits people with no intention to cheat and little awareness of what the cat system does to the races. It’s for the effect of course. Or people will just sit and voice the same complaints and bewilderment over Zwift races in forums and on social media over and over and over. The most common complaints are caused by either or all of the below three, but more often than not they miss the real target(s):

  1. No category enforcement

  2. DQ’s inside races due to a performance ceiling

  3. Cats based on Watts rather than results

People would be happier with them gone. Note that Zwift isn’t guilty of all of them (well, now they are after the ZP takeover).

1 Like

So I’m new to B - I probably break some of your analysis, I won a few C races on my way up. I went from being not competitive, to suddenly being competitive, to bumping the top of category in a few weeks - then I wanted to finish the series I was in. I didn’t cruise, but I did avoid shorter races for a few weeks.
There seems to be far less of an issue in B than C - in C virtually every race the front pack is driven by B’s - there’s no opportunity to attack, and the winners are the ones who can hold on. Because of this, there actually doesn’t seem to be a huge difference to me in holding on to a B pack compared to the C. Mind you, there would often only be a small number of legitimate C’s able to hold on to those B’s - most of the C’s were in another group far behind. Anyway, my solution is try to get to A where none of this is a problem. We’ll see if I manage it. The quickest to implement thing though, would be a certain number of wins/podiums to ‘level up’ - say 5 wins/podiums, you go up a category for 30 days or something.

I 100% agree that the WKG tag for someone entering the correct race is completely counterproductive. Our Herd series stopped using the WKG tag, and allows a result as long as the right category was entered. I’ve had discussions with people mad about it, I say it’s far better to have people doing their best.

This is a wrong assumption. Given the the figures you suggest above i think the lighter rider would easily win that race. Would be good to see any data on this if you have it?

taking a recent TT as an example.

Richard Haigh 336 93kg
Stewart Sayer 306 75kg

The lighter rider finished nearly a minute ahead on this sub 30 minute TT course. Yes he ended up doing 4.1w/k compared to 3.6w/k but i’m sure if he did slightly less maybe 3.8 w/k he would of still finished ahead of the heavier rider.
Also from doing many TTTs as lighter rider in a team i know i have to push hard to keep up but not near the power that the heavier riders are putting out.

Lighter riders are at a disadvantage particular in the lower cats where there are heavier riders cruising. As you go up the cats the only way riders can increase their performance to the levels required is to reduce weight.

What I would like to see from zwift is two things. Stop the sandbagging and possibly look at the minimum power requirements for categories.
Cruising as you suggest can’t be stopped unless we removed the cat system which is an interesting idea as well although i’d like to see in the first option them try to improve the current system

Spot on for me Gordon.
I race at Cat C and weigh in at 98kg - the norm for me is for to finish lower than most lighter riders with lower power output but higher w/kg.

1 Like

@Craig_Martin_Herd_Of wrote:

So I’m new to B - I probably break some of your analysis, I won a few C races on my way up. I went from being not competitive, to suddenly being competitive, to bumping the top of category in a few weeks - then I wanted to finish the series I was in. I didn’t cruise, but I did avoid shorter races for a few weeks.

No, I don’t think you’re breaking the analysis. If you’re willing to work hard, then you can be competitive for a brief while as you are on the cusp of getting upgraded. A sandbagger you just cannot beat, but a cruiser is not impossible to beat. It’s just that he has the upper hand, which on average will show in his results. But since you’re not monitoring your 20 min W/kg like he is (or you’d be a cruiser) then sooner or later, if your fitness doesn’t deteriorate, you’ll go over limits and get upgraded. The cruiser can be around for years in the same cat. I could show you examples, but I won’t. Like I have said before, this isn’t about individuals doing a bad thing. It’s about a bad system doing bad things to people.

You bring up another important point that I haven’t mentioned myself although I’m painfully aware of it. Another of the many flaws of the W/kg system - distance! In a way you can only be competitive in a cat (unless you are cruising) on a certain distance. The stupid W/kg system doesn’t take distance into account. Typically, results-based cat systems do weigh in distance. The points scheme for races in US cycling go deeper down the classification in longer races and in x-country skiing it’s accounted for via finish time separation (which of course varies with distance).

I’m sure many Zwifters have made the mistake of participating in sprint races while they were on top of a cat with regards to standard 40’ish min races. In a sprint race you can of course do W/kg that wouldn’t be achievable in a 40 min race and so you get upgraded earlier. Which means you are actually below the W/kg floor in your new cat in a 40’ish min race! It’s just so dumb…

@Gordon_Rhino-Racing wrote:

This is a wrong assumption. Given the the figures you suggest above i think the lighter rider would easily win that race. Would be good to see any data on this if you have it?

Well, I didn’t provide data or calculations for the single theoretical case with the heavier 300W rider against the lighter 275W rider. It’s just an arbitrary example to illustrate a point. But I don’t actually think the lighter rider would win in a TT where both riders put out ERG like even Watts. The lighter rider will be faster than a rider at 275W with the same weight as the 300W guy. This is because the lighter rider - as I discovered only recently although others knew already - does suffer less air resistance. But this difference in air resistance is very small. I could be wrong, but I highly doubt it could account for a whopping 25W in this scenario.

What I did provide data for was that riders with a weight higher than the race average podium more than the average weight rider. And this is an undisputable fact. What the results say, literally, is that I could sample 40 new races a thousand times and the result would be the same every time, i.e. heavier riders do have an advantage in C and B (and of course D although I didn’t include them).

What I didn’t discuss (and didn’t study) was that while there is some sort of correlation between weight and win rate, it is not linear. You don’t win more the heavier you get obviously. Rather, I’m guessing it’s something like this, if we transpose a graph of win probability to weight on top a distribution chart over racer weights:


So on the X-axis we have rider weight. And on the Y-axis we have both n = the total no of racers we look at, and also p = win probability.

So weight is a typical normally distributed human feature, and A here is the average weight of racers in a certain cat. B is the average weight of winners in the same cat who of course also have the highest win probability. So most racers will be fairly close to the avg weight. But most winners actually weigh a bit more than the avg racer weight. At some point the additional weight will start to damage win probability though and so p starts to drop off. Why is that? You have it figured out already but maybe others don’t. It’s because of this:


So the first rider is a bigger and heavier guy than the second rider. No 2 gets a wee bit less air resistance in Zwift due to his lower weight and, possibly, shorter height. But it doesn’t make up for No 1’s bigger muscle volume. No 1 can push much higher Watts at 3.2 W/kg than the No 2 on the flattish (like the standard Zwift race) and that will translate to higher speeds and thus more wins on average. The key thing here is that both of them are capped at 3.2 W/kg or they get a DQ. So the lighter rider can’t compensate with a higher W/kg and win.

The No 3 guy, I would say, is past the point where his higher weight gives him an advantage. The two first riders have roughly the same body fat percentage, so bigger size = more muscle. But No 3 has a higher body fat percentage than both the others and excess body fat doesn’t do you much good in a hard 40 min race in Zwift (I can attest to that). And so the win probability curve starts to drop off beyond a certain point because people only grow so tall and thus they only get so heavy, and beyond that any extra kg’s is body fat.

(The exception here, maybe, is that people who used to carry a lot of overweight and then lose it, working hard in Zwift, are often damn strong because their muscles used to have to carry that overweight around - they often come out of a weight loss like rockets in Zwift, a little reward for the struggle perhaps, well deserved.)

In your own example the lighter riders wins and shows a much higher W/kg. That’s great! Why would you want to rob him of the win by pasting a big fat DQ on his race result? Why even speculate whether he could still have won doing 3.8 W/kg? (I’m not so sure he would BTW.) That is the same as saying “Could he have won on ZP if he had cruised the race?” (4.1 is OK, I know, but you get it.) So yeah, you understand why I’m against the W/kg system. And I’m sure none of us would regret a move to a results-based ranking once it’s in place. It would be so worth it. There is nothing to lose, because the system we have is crap.

You’re absolutely right about the way the importance of weight changes as you rise in categories. You see it clearly in data. Even so, a higher than average weight in cat B, where people are clearly slimmer on average than in C or D, is an advantage. The results are there in my little study, no doubt about it. And then in cat A, where there is no performance ceiling, you have your muscle volume and your fitness, whatever it is, and only stand to gain from a weight loss, up to the point where it starts to hurt your performance of course.

@Phil_Waters wrote:

I race at Cat C and weigh in at 98kg - the norm for me is for to finish lower than most lighter riders with lower power output but higher w/kg.

But then you’re not on top of cat C, if there is still room for a higher W/kg! Once you are just below the 3.2 W/kg ceiling, then I assure you that you will have an advantage over lighter riders. They have no counter to you, none that wouldn’t result in a ZP DQ anyway.

2 Likes

I guess I don’t see it as a big problem. The sandbaggers (‘cruisers’ as you call them, but to me that’s the very definition of sandbagging) aren’t doing anything but stunting their own performance. People who are trying to improve will surpass them.
The problem is that you can’t identify this behavior with sureity, and whatever your system is, people will attempt to take advantage like this. My IRL bike racing is BMX, and in our sanction you move up after a certain number of race wins. Sandbagging is prohibited, and enforcement of the rule against it is at the discretion of track operators - the punishment is forfiet of points earned and being credited with the win anyway. But even if it’s podiums or top 10s instead of wins, people will try to finish 4th or 11th to delay the promotion.
I love what the race director for our 10 week league has done in including Tempus Fugit and Bologna TT’s in the 10 week series. I saw an interesting request on ZP forums to delete a period of data due to ‘miscalibration’ that included one of those and another race that happened to put someone up into the next category. It certainly appears that a person that’s been at the top of a category for a while and then makes that kind of request wants to stay there instead of moving up, I’d agree - but someone has to make a judgement call, and currently, apart from it not being against any rules, no one is given that authority or wants to make those calls. And ‘innocent’ people will get caught up in trying to police sandbagging as well. (I don’t like to call entering the wrong category sandbagging. Cherry-picking maybe)

1 Like

Over time, yes, they’re hurting themselves if they keep doing this. But in each race, they’re upsetting plenty of non-cheating racers, some of whom might be put off Zwift racing because of this.

And if there are enough doing this on just an occasional basis, the they’re not hurting themselves at all and are only hurting others.

So they’re far from only affecting themselves.

4 Likes

@Craig_Martin_Herd_Of, I would have to agree with Steve here. The thing is even if people might still be trying to delay an upgrade by finishing just outside the points scheme (or you can obfuscate going the FIS route to ranking calculations instead), then while they are stalling at least they are not winning. Their presence would distort the race texture somewhat although not nearly as much as a sandbagger or cruiser with an intent to win but they are not competing for the podium at that time. It would be better. At this point almost any change would be better.

But it’s a moot point. With the ZwiftPower September Update post, Zwift is making it clear where they stand. I can’t interpret it as anything but an indirect reply to the discussions we’ve been having lately, a big middle finger in the face. Zwift racing is to remain the uniquely stupid sport among sports just… because?

Anyway, I totally agree that sandbagging is a correct term, lent from horse racing originally I guess, for what I call cruising. It’s just that the term sandbagger has been misused so much that in a race where people from higher categories join (like every race 24/7) and then go flying right from the start, the legit racers go “Look! A despicable sandbagger! It’s his fault we can’t get fair racing in Zwift!” And ZP goes “Yeah, we saw that, we’ll DQ the despicable sandbagger for you so you get fair racing. There! Now it’s fair again.” and Zwift goes “Hey, we’ll spend our limited dev resources experimenting with adding a funny-looking geometric shape on top of the head of the despicable sandbagger, so you really can tell you just lost to a despicable sandbagger”. And then many legit racers think they’re good. They’re not.

So another term was needed to reclaim the issue. I did a forum search but I just can’t find the guy who accidentally coined the term for me. He should be credited.

While the term sandbagging describes the phenomenon well, the term cruising does too, perhaps even better. Because sandbagging sort of hints at a malicious intent. Cruising doesn’t. Some people intentionally cruise to get on the podium, maliciously. Other just like to cruise in general, it comes natural to them, it’s the way they want to use Zwift, and that’s fine. But if they also happen to be on top of their category, then they win far more than riders with a natural tendency to work hard. Not so fine for various reasons IMO, but the problem isn’t the sandbaggers, cruisers, cherry pickers, HC flyers, whatever. It’s the cat system and race rules. You get the racers you deserve in any system.

1 Like