Why are some races not category enforced and riders not dq’d for entering wrong CAT?
did this race below and it was full of cheats?
Category Enforcement is an option available to the organizer. It’s their choice to enable it or not. Unless I know the organizer will manage it properly, I just don’t enter those events. You can talk to the organizer about DQs. Zwift will let the organizer do whatever they want. Looks like the top two C category riders were A and A+, and one of the B category riders was an A as well. If you don’t get a good response from the organizer, avoid their events.
I came across a 2 races yesterday morning that were category enforced. Had 1 C rider in D cat and had 1 B rider in C cat. Both riders were clearly in the wrong cat and their profiles stated they had prior races in the week in regards to their correct Zwift category,… there are issues abound.
I don’t remember the names of these 2 races, as issues like this makes me ignore them
It should never be possible for a C category rider to enter D pen in a race with Category Enforcement. If that happened it would be a bug worth reporting. I have never seen that happen. However I have seen riders with stale category data on ZwiftPower, and riders who were upgraded after an event so you check after results and they are in a new category. Those situations are pretty common.
As mentioned, it’s apparently up to the organizer. That said, I think it is a valid question of whether Zwift should allow a race organizer to run events that do not have some system of enforcement, nor take any action to disqualify out-of-cat participants.
By the way, the A+ rider in C category (60+ years old) doesn’t have a power meter and is riding with a speed sensor. He has loads of DQs for using zPower, but not in this event, plus he has a history of entering C category when he can get away with it. Those are all things the organizer can control with almost no effort. Signs point to this being a poorly organized event. Events like this one will attract that type of rider since they can’t get away with it elsewhere.
I went to the join link and I couldn’t join anything but my cat or higher,… so either a bug or what you mentioned. Regardless, next time I will take note.
If a rider signs up to standard Category Enforcement races before a pen promotion, they are still allowed to race in the lower category.
For example, I signed up to a load of week 4 Zmonthly pen D races for this Xmas week, approx 10 days ago. I then got an unexpected zMAP promotion on 23rd Dec, but still took part in at least one of those D races on Xmas Day, on another as good as pancake flat Zmonthly race course where zMAP is meaningless and it’s all about sprinting if going for the race win.
Predicting zMAP rather than using actual data for a given time duration has always been a poor decision, in my opinion.
In the race in question for me ZwiftPower - Login , my 6min effort was 3.18W/Kg and I came 4th against other 90Kg+ riders. As I’ve already written, I suspect (but cannot prove) that my Saris H3 inflated my numbers a little, due to temps rising since I last did a calibration in cooler temps in early December.
What’s more ridiculous is that one of the riders that finished ahead of me, Dom Sim, had higher W/Kg for me in the 4-6min except at 5mins30secs, where it was 3.24 vs 3.23 W/Kg. Pretty sure I saw their profile show a promotion like me to C after the Tiny Races, but now they are back in D… How does that work? 
Very true, but the C category “winner” in the event being discussed here has been steadily racing in A lately, up to a few days ago. There’s no way they got a C-to-A upgrade recently. My money is on they chose to do this because of the bad event configuration. That rider also has a history of entering C in non-enforced events.