Has anyone had any luck in contacting Zwift with regards to organising your own races?
We have been organising a few regular races on a Tuesday between local triathlon clubs, but are only able to do this as a meet-up. However, because of the way riders are “lined up” on a meet up, starting positions are unfair and often mean that final results are not accurate due to segment time etc.
Has anyone managed to do anything like this successfully? Have any tips on improving?
Hi @Ed_Gilbertson_BRT, the events team is swamped, look at all the cool new events they are organizing with pro teams and tours, etc. There are so many events every day already.
It is my understanding that you need to prove, somehow, that your club or meetups are super popular and attendance is regularly 100 people or more per week before you can even get their attention. Every local club is now turning to Zwift to host their rides and there just isn’t enough bandwidth on the events team at Zwift to accommodate all the requests. Also, imagine how hard it would be to find an event on the companion app of every single local club had a ride or race, it would be a mess in my opinion.
There are plenty of races already on the schedule, I’m sure you can find one that will accommodate your club. Or continue to use the meetup function for now. As the club’s feature is fine tuned and eventually rolled out it will be easier for local clubs to organize their own rides and races, but the timeline is unknown at this point.
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My local clubs do the following:
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Tell everyone to use zwiftpower and put a certain acronym in our name to help with results.
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Choose a race or three each week from the huge number of races available on zwift and promote them to the club pages on Facebook
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Use zwiftpower results (and searching for the acronym) to give the results and publish on Facebook.
They have also taken on trying to do either a pre race YouTube show or a live stream with commentary. And also challenging other cycling clubs to points competitions in races or race series.
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That’s fair enough. It’s clear that Zwift is busier than ever at the moment for obvious reasons.
I’m guessing in an ideal world we would be hoping that a race we set up wouldn’t be available to join in companion as, as it would be limited to just those in local tri clubs, so would be more of a private/invite only event.
Do you know any more information about the club’s feature then? It might be worth keeping an eye on this for the near future.
Thanks for your reply Mike.
I’d be interested to know how the results are gathered from Zwiftpower. Is this done manually by going through the results of all categories? How do the points/leaderboard work if people are racing but in different categories?
Streaming seems to be a separate issue altogether. We have a large number in our “Zwift” club at the moment, with a select few chosen to race. The others who aren’t racing would like to watch but we’ve really been struggling to stream a video with good enough quality.
All the info is here on the forums in the Future Works section:
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Interesting read. Sounds like Zwift Clubs is exactly what we are looking for!
Lots of tech issues with streaming. Another way for people to watch is they select on the game/app that they are going to the race then click on the racer they want to follow. They can click on other people as the race goes on to see what’s happening. Obviously not the same level of enjoyment as watching a stream but an idea.
As for separate grades, as long as everyone has a zwift power grade/category then there isn’t an issue with sandbagging. They look at the results page, type in the acronym into the search bar and the results are all there separated into categories and we treat them like that (so a podium for our A grade, another podium for our B grade etc).
If you are doing a points competition with another club, then get them to have their own acronym, then decide on a way to assign points, do separate results for each grade or add them all together. One way to get points is the last person over the line from the two clubs gets 1 point, the second last gets 2 points, the third last gets 3 points dt. unfortunately this can be really affected by the number of racers from each club. Another way to do points is first out of two clubs over the line gets 10 points, second gets 9, third gets 8 etc. This way only top ten results count but the people that aren’t likely to get a good result will feel like there isn’t a point in racing.
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