Quitting a race after exceeding category power limits

I was watching a race today to see two “giants” slug it out. All of a sudden, one of them just slowed down. I was surprised as I know he’s a very strong rider (no names, no reporting).

So I had a quick look on ZP live and sure enough, both of these guys had hit at or VERY close to 20-minute Cat limits. The guy ahead clearly didn’t notice as he carried on and a minute later he was properly exceeding 20-minute cat limits. Shortly after that, he disappeared. Quit the race.

Our other hero carried on for a bit at about half power, but then also stopped and quit.

I’m posting this, not to name anyone (I won’t - in this case - if I wanted to report, I’d use the proper channels), but to ask is this even against any rules? Or is it just a little loophole that sandbaggers use if they get too excited and go over power? In my opinion it’s certainly unsporting, but is it a breach of any Zwift or ZwiftPower rule? Anyone know?

And if it IS a loophole, is there some way of closing it, because surely going over is going over?

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Not against any rules as far as I’m aware.

Cat Enforcement was meant to nullify it, but that just has its own pile of issues.

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Yes CE is closing that. With CE the whole power curve is being looked at so that fast 19 minutes will probably get them upgraded.

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Did the event have Category Enforcement enabled? If not, it may have been chosen for that reason.

ZwiftPower is owned by Zwift so it doesn’t have any rules that aren’t Zwift rules.

No. It wasn’t CE.

That makes it more suspicious but there’s no way to know why a person slows down or quits unless they reveal it somewhere. Riders blow up, have needy pets and children, phone calls, etc.

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I’m not in any doubt. There’s plenty of excuses that could be used. Internet outage would be a good one. If I had videoed the race and live ZP power stats, nobody watching would be in any doubt either. But all I’m really interested in here is if this practice breaches a rule or not.

Seems like not.

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ZRL is half the issue. A lot of racers care about that series above all others, and they refuse to use CE. It’s a sandbaggers paradise and riders need to ensure they do not get upgraded (as they should) and then let their team down.

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Yeah - hope the rankings-based approach catches on (yours or whatever Zwift has planned). It’s obviously the way forward. Both these guys are right at the top of their category and win or podium everything they enter.

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zwift could force them to use CE but for some reason they are content with having multiple confusing systems in place rather than it being uniform across all race series

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Quitting will probably stop the race counting towards their Zwiftpower category, but pretty sure it will going on their CE pen allocation calculation.

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I’m pretty sure these riders are already the category above in CE. This was a non-CE race.

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Max NP in the last month / weight. This formula is working wonders in categorizing racers (https://www.flammerougeracing.com/).

I’m sure it works for some and perhaps a lot of racers, but I found it to be the most uncompetitive formula I have used.

Until we can get an official ranking system (https://www.zwiftracing.app/) this system is able to filter the strongest B, C and D and move them up to the next CAT. Category Enforcement failed, Zwiftpower 95% 20m, failed.

In our C WTRL Racing League Team it just filtered the real 4 most dangerous racers.

The CAT system is difficult to understand but funny tho:

Of course, nothing is perfect but Zwift races are won in burst of power (mostly 1 to 5 minutes, then in fewer races >7 minutes).

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