Zwift HQ-organized races have become stale. Every week, it’s the same course, repeated across all days and time zones. And while predictability has its place, the current format feels less like innovation and more like creative stagnation.
To put it plainly: racing the same course every day for a week is like playing Counter-Strike 2 with only the Dust II map available. Sure, Dust II is legendary—well-balanced and iconic—but no matter how good the map is, running it exclusively drains excitement, limits tactics, and eventually burns out the players. The same is happening in Zwift.
When riders log in to race, they’re often met with the exact same experience they had two or three days earlier. No change in terrain, no shift in race dynamics—just a carbon copy of what came before. This not only dulls the competitive edge but also turns race preparation into muscle memory instead of strategy. There’s no incentive to show up again until the next week. That’s a huge red flag for a platform built around participation and progression.
But the real damage goes deeper than personal boredom—it’s hurting the broader racing ecosystem and club-led events in particular.
When Zwift HQ schedules rigid, one-course-per-week race blocks across the entire calendar, it monopolizes the attention of the racing audience. Casual racers gravitate toward the official races because they’re featured prominently and offer XP, drops, and in-game rewards. Meanwhile, club-organized events—often with more creative formats and thoughtful course selection—get buried. These are the grassroots lifeblood of Zwift racing, yet they’re being pushed to the sidelines.
The result? Lower turnout for club events, fewer volunteers willing to organize them, and a sense of futility among long-standing community leaders. Why bother building a race series with rotating courses, team components, or segment points when everyone is busy riding the same Zwift-sanctioned route five times a week?
Zwift’s strength has always been its community and the wide spectrum of athletes it brings together. But the top-down structure of HQ races is slowly eroding that foundation. Racing is not one-size-fits-all. Some riders excel in sprints, others on long climbs, and some thrive in tactical, rolling races. If the official race calendar never reflects that diversity, the platform begins to alienate the very riders who helped it grow.
The solution isn’t complicated. Zwift HQ could easily rotate courses mid-week, create theme weeks (like “Mountain Monday” or “TT Thursday”), or even highlight a different world each day. Even better, they could integrate and promote well-run community events as part of the weekly race calendar, rather than treating them as an afterthought.
Because at the end of the day, people don’t log in to Zwift to do the same race five times a week. They log in to be challenged, surprised, and inspired. Until that returns to the official race calendar, Zwift risks turning a vibrant racing community into a ghost town—riders stuck doing laps on Dust II, wondering where all the fun went.
