Just watched an A race on YouTube, and the winner was a 12 year old who averaged 9 w/kg for the last 5 min of the race, and did 7.1 w/kg for the entire 24 min race. This discourages honest, competitive racers and newbies getting into races getting their doors blown off.
The next generation of Zwift Ride should include a saddle or seat post or cranks that measure weight. Imagine a scenario where the saddle measures the riders weight through the race and actively determines w/kg based on fluid consumption and sweating.
Is this weight doping? If they’re really twelve they might actually be whatever weight they’ve entered.
To me the issue there is that zwifts physics model is only valid - or at least reasonably valid - within a certain weight range. At some point zwift decided to allow people to enter weight lower than this to be more inclusive, without going to the effort of fixing the physics at those weights or limiting the ability to participate in races or appear on leaderboards.
There is also an issue that heights and weights are able to be entered and changed without any restriction, not so much as a warning that the change is significant or unusual.
I think the solution needs to be on the software side, focused on consistency and ensuring the models have reliable data to work with rather than real world verification. If you go down the path of having hardware that checks weight you then need to get people buying that hardware, that introduces more cost and will reduce user numbers. If you require height and weight verification you need someone to check it, that’s a big undertaking that I don’t think is worth it outside of elite level performances.
Zwift has always preferred inclusiveness over integrity. Possibly making the assumption that the people who notice and care are generally the habitual users who are unlikely to leave.
I completely agree that the lack of integrity in races and leaderboards makes the experience worse for everyone, and could prevent those newcomers becoming habitual users.
I don’t think you’ve thought this through enough. I don’t think your proposed hardware solution would be effective. Lots of other things they could do to prevent height/weight manipulation but making their smart bike more expensive when the vast majority of riders don’t race at all doesn’t make much sense and I can already think of easy ways to defeat it if I wanted to cheat.
Weight doping is a problem everywhere, not just racing. But how do you avoid people finding ways to game the weight measurement saddle.
And what of those folks who need to have a specific saddle, quite often the default ones included (like the Kickr Bike default saddle) are torture devices.
One thing is the young riders might really only be very light. I know one from my old club was mid 50kg weight with an FTP about 35 watts higher than mine. Of course in Zwift folks thought it was cheating, but in real life he won A grade races on a real bike. And yes I know real life means nothing.
Oh it’s quite interesting how folks go up ADZ at crazy speeds (and even lighter than me), then they miraculously seem to go downhill at record speeds (which only a much heavier rider would do). You can guess what they are doing.
For the most part, having software checks to catch out edge case or obviously impossible weight/power/heart rate combinations would be a start. It won’t solve everything, but it will be a start.
