A Sad Day for Cycling Esports
Blog #30
If you haven’t seen the news yet, the Escape Collective reported yesterday that Zwift has cancelled Zwift World Series (“ZWS”) for the 2025-2026 season, and has no plans to replace it. You can read the email they sent riders on Zwift Insider here. I’m writing this column the morning after the news, and my feelings are raw. I’m sad. I’m pissed off. I’m also not that surprised. But mostly I’m just feeling pretty defeated about the future of the sport.
With that in mind, here are some (unfiltered) initial reactions:
1. The writing was on the wall
It’s no secret that Zwift completely bungled the first season of ZWS. And that’s probably an understatement. I won’t rehash it all here, but the short of it was that Zwift had a successful elite series back in the Premier Division days that was fully tied to community racing on the platform, weakened the brand when they shifted to the Grand Prix, and then made a massive error in ditching team-based racing for ZWS.
As I detailed in the above though, the format and focus on individual results wasn’t the only problem with ZWS. You can read the details in the article, but to summarize: Zwift just didn’t give a s$#@ about ZWS. Not only did it fail to publish start lists or publicize the events at all, it also left fans completely in the dark as to if and when the races would actually happen.
In the Zwift email to riders announcing the ZWS cancelation, it told riders:
For many years Zwift has invested substantially in broadcast production, broadcast distribution partnerships (e.g. GCN), prize money, performance verification and independent governance for elite level regular season racing events like Zwift World Series. Regrettably, the current level of audience interest and viewership for these events makes continuing to support this investment unsustainable.
I don’t doubt that all of this is true, and we will get to the financials of it all below, but it’s so rich for Zwift to complain about ZWS viewership when:
Two days before Stage 4, no one but the riders knew the race was happening until we published that news on this blog. How are fans supposed to watch a race they don’t know is happening and that Zwift hasn’t bothered to publicize?
It’s not like fan engagement has been a problem before. I’ve published viewership numbers before for professional cycling esports events, and keeping in mind all the caveats I discussed there, at its peak the old Premier Division was getting 32,500 viewers per stage. The fact that ZWS averaged only 11,640 was due to a variety of factors, but a big one was Zwift’s lack of engagement in the event.
2. The financials of professional virtual cycling are toughhh
Zwift would never say this publicly, but it’s clear they are getting screwed in the professional racing space by the money MyWhoosh has been able to throw around.
When Zwift first launched Zwift Grand Prix in 2022, prior to MyWhoosh really coming onto the scene, the total prize pool for both men and women was $57,000, a massive amount at the time. That amount increased to $100,000 for the 2023-2024 Grand Prix season, but even at that level of funding Zwift just can’t keep up:
In 2024, MyWhoosh paid out more than $3.75 million in prize money to riders racing on their platform, and in 2025 that number should exceed [$5 million with the revival of the MyWhoosh Championship].1 Contrast that with Zwift, where the total prize purse for the most recent Zwift Games totaled approximately $112,700 and the total prize purse for Zwift World Series was slightly higher at $133,400, a total of just under $250,000 for the entirety of the 2024-2025 season.2 Not nothing. But measly in comparison to the MyWhoosh numbers.
The entirely predictable consequence of this financial disparity is that Zwift has struggled to induce top riders to compete in their events. During the first iteration of Zwift Games, where stages were held on Sundays, there were notable riders that either rode both Sunday Race Club and Zwift Games on the same day or ditched Zwift Games entirely for potentially higher SRC payouts.
This year, Zwift moved the Zwift Games stages to Saturdays, presumably to avoid having to compete with SRC. ZWS races were on Thursdays, but Zwift still struggled mightily to retain riders. Only 11 women finished all five stages without being annulled, and it wasn’t much better on the men’s side with only 19.
The obvious problem for Zwift is that it actually has to care about profitability. It doesn’t have unlimited pockets like MyWhoosh. And it’s here that I’m incredibly sympathetic to Zwift. They put out almost $250,000 of prize money this year for professional races - not to mention the back-end work needed to make it happen - and it still wasn’t enough. At a certain point, you have to wonder if the investment is worth it. These are basically advertising events for Zwift - they aren’t profitable in their own right - and if almost $250,000 isn’t enough to do that well, Zwift has concluded that it isn’t worth the effort.
3. This is a massive inflection point in the sport
It’s hard to overstate this. Even though the writing was on the wall with Zwift’s increasing disinterest in professional racing, officially canceling ZWS puts a nail in that coffin and cements MyWhoosh as the dominant platform in the space. Sure, Zwift (hopefully) will still hold Zwift Games, but other than that the three other professional events at the moment (SRC, MyWhoosh Championship, and the UCI Championship) are all on MyWhoosh. Their money is winning out.
4. Here’s why this news makes me pretty defeated about the future of the sport
I’ve always been a steadfast supporter of two things in professional cycling esports: (i) riders getting paid, and (ii) competition between platforms. But there’s a third thing I’ve written about extensively as well - the importance of professional racing that rises organically from community events:
The origins of elite virtual racing were effectively just the best community racers banding together and saying “huh, we should all race each other.” The first pro race in our database, the KISS Super League, was a 2019 exhibition of the top community Zwift teams facing off against pro road teams. And that spirit of high-level, community-driven racing lives on today with a host of series like Zwift Racing League, Flamme Rougue Racing, and a bunch of others . . . .
[It is this] intimate connection to community racing [that] drives interest in the sport . . . .[It is what] led to [such] a high level of fan engagement with [the Premier Division]. For at least a good chunk of this period, Zwift Community Live was broadcasting some community-level races, and those riders were therefore more engaged in the pro-level racing.
The cancelation of ZWS highlights the tension between these three principles. The economics of the sport - at least as they currently exist - do not allow all three to coexist. However you want to allocate the blame, the combination of MyWhoosh money and Zwift missteps has killed this kind of racing for the time being.
Because it’s worth reemphasizing: fan engagement will only come when crappy C-grade riders like me can ride an event, finish up, then flip on YouTube to watch the pros race the same course. I’ve talked to folks who, in the Premier Division days when it was just the top level of Zwift Racing League, would watch the pro races to scout out team tactics in preparation for their community races. That’s the sort of engagement that is sustainable in this space.
The economics of the sport also make it difficult for competition between platforms to actually flourish. Because the trouble is, the competition isn’t happening on an even playing field. The was a time when indieVelo - borne from the community with a focus on improving racing - was rising organically and seen as a real potential competitor to Zwift in the racing space. But it was bought out by TrainingPeaks, and since then hasn’t really engaged in the sport.
This is the trouble with the MyWhoosh money. It’s just a ridiculous level of funding with no expectation of profitability. I don’t have a great answer here. On the one hand, I love that riders are getting paid, and that top riders can have cycling esports as their full-time job. I truly do. But in my worst, most pessimistic moments, I worry that the money is driving other platforms out of the sport and we are going to end up in a weird, undesirable place where community racing happens on Zwift while the pros flee to MyWhoosh, racing in events untethered from the community with no one watching. And then the sport dies a slow, quiet death. Because why should Zwift, Rouvy, TrainingPeaks Virtual, or anyone else try to compete with MyWhoosh? They are running businesses and can’t just bleed money. And the level of funding needed to compete right now just doesn’t make sense.
5. Ending with optimism
That’s the pessimistic take. But I don’t want to end there. Here’s what I wrote a few months ago, and I still believe it today:
[There is an aspect of virtual cycling that I know is] sustainable: the community . . . . So while the economics and structure of professional virtual racing may - and almost certainly will - change, I’m confident that there will always be organic, bottom-up interest in the sport. And as long as that is the case, there will be some form of elite/professional virtual racing as well. We at Pro E Cycling will be there to follow all of it.
One programming note: this post will likely serve as the blog for next Tuesday. As I mentioned last time, I’ll be taking a couple weeks off to work on some exciting back end stuff for the website, but will be back with our MyWhoosh Championship preview!
These numbers also include payouts to non-professional riders in lower categories in Sunday Race Club and MyWhoosh Championship, though the figures for the elite category are highest.
All my calculations. Total prize purses include the (equal) prize money for both men’s and women’s events.