Blog #3: The Death of the Zwift Grand Prix

How one of virtual cycling's best events met its quiet end

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Let’s start with a basic premise: from a fan perspective, the best era of virtual racing we’ve ever seen was in the heyday of the Zwift Premier Division (ZPD) from the fall of 2020 to the spring of 2022.¹ I actually don’t think this is a polemic statement: there was some seriously cool racing going on during this period, and we haven’t fully managed to get back there in the three years since.

For the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 seasons, Zwift rechristened the Premier Division as the Zwift Grand Prix (ZGP).² But this season, Zwift pulled the plug on what was the longest-running professional e-race and replaced it with the Zwift World Series (ZWS).

To put it bluntly: this was a mistake.³ That isn’t to say that the transition from ZPD to ZGP was perfect. Indeed, Zwift made a series of errors that diluted the brand and meant that, by the time ZGP was officially cancelled, fan engagement in the series had already declined substantially. Still, it’s not too late. Zwift should cut its losses and return to some of the principles that made ZPD so great.

This is the first part of a two part series. In this post, I dig into why ZPD was so great and the missteps in transitioning to ZGP that made it less attractive to fans. Next week, we will examine how Zwift can bring it back.

ZPD: Sort of the Perfect Race?

To understand why we a Pro E Cycling were - and let’s just be honest here - such ZPD fans, we really need to look back at how the race series began.

As with all great things in virtual cycling, ZPD was borne out of the community. WTRL, the organization now best known for running the ultra popular Zwift Racing League (ZRL),⁴ had gotten its start with the Thursday Team Time Trial (TTT) Series, a community event that just seemed to keep growing every week. In the fall of 2020, Zwift partnered with WTRL to launch the first season of ZRL. ZRL was divided into a series of Category A, B, C, and D leagues, and further divided into leagues for different time zones. In short, this opened participation up to any rider of any ability anywhere in the world.

Sitting atop this structure was the Premier Division. ZPD was made up of the best teams in the Zwift universe, all racing against each other in a single time slot. Critically, the race structure for the pro series mostly mirrored the amateur races. It’s worth pausing here to emphasize this formula: essentially what Zwift did is take an already popular community event (the Thursday TTT Series), lend its support to help that event develop into something even better (ZRL), and then leverage existing community engagement to feed the professional series (ZPD). There was no magic sauce here, just Zwift recognizing the strength of community racing on its platform and putting its thumb on the scale to help professionalize the upper tier of those races.

Moreover, much like European soccer,⁵ Zwift implemented a promotion and relegation system whereby the best community teams from the previous ZRL season would replace the worst ZPD teams. Not only did this structure create stronger links between the professional and community ranks by providing a pathway through which community racers could ascend to the upper echelon of the sport, it also fortified competition at the ZPD level by eliminating some of the teams that struggled to get enough riders each season.

The connection between the professional-level ZPD and the community-level ZRL also meant that race structures stayed simple. These were almost entirely team-centric points races, with (i) “first across the line” intermediate points sprints and K/QOMs and (ii) finish line points. Teams won by scoring the most points over the course of the race. Easy peasy. And although the nature of virtual racing allows for more complex race formats, making these races accessible to thousands of racers at the ZRL level countered that instinct because the formats had to be easily understood to enable mass participation.

Taken together, this led to a high level of fan engagement with ZPD. 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. Here are YouTube viewership numbers for all seven editions of the ZPD and ZGP, along with some other high profile races as a benchmark:⁶

EDIT June 17, 2025: When I published this article, I did not realize that the 2023 UCI World Championship was broadcast on both Zwift’s YouTube channel and GCN’s. The above chart accounts for only the Zwift broadcast that year. As of today, the Zwift broadcast has 105,000 views, and the GCN one - which I didn’t account for initially - has 52,000. So the total viewership for the 2023 UCI World Championship should be 157,000.

As is evident from the above chart, viewership numbers varied widely from season to season due to a variety of factors beyond what is discussed in this post. First, the earlier seasons occurred during the pandemic, which in all likelihood boosted their audience. Weather was probably also a factor at points: for instance, our best guess as to why the numbers for ‘20-’21 ZPD S2 were so much higher than S3 that season is just that the latter occurred over the spring when more people were riding outside. Finally, there was undoubtedly a viewership bump for the two editions of ZPD during the ‘21-’22 season, which were broadcast by GCN Racing rather than Zwift.

But still, some of the numbers ZPD was putting up at its peak - 49,000 viewers for Stage 1 of the ‘21-’22 S2 and a 32,500 average for that whole edition - rival some of the numbers of the inaugural version of the much-hyped Zwift Games last year, and the most watched ZPD stage eclipsed the number of viewers for the most recent UCI World Championship on MyWhoosh.⁷

Whatever the causal reason, those are some startling numbers. But just as startling is how quickly they fell off when Zwift transitioned from ZPD to ZGP. Indeed, no stage of the ‘22-’23 and ‘23-’24 ZGPs drew more viewers than any stage of the two ‘21-’22 editions of the ZPD. So let’s get to some of the reasons why ZGP was never able to achieve the same level of success.

ZGP: A Flawed Experiment

So what happened? This section lays out some of the mistakes Zwift made in transitioning to ZGP. The next section provides some examples from races illustrating these mistakes.

Bye-Bye ZRL

Start with the original sin. When Zwift announced the creation of Zwift Grand Prix in August 2022, it was billed as an event completely divorced from its ZRL origins. From the Zwift Insider article at the time:

As the northern hemisphere heads into “indoor season”, Zwift is taking a long, hard look at what elite-level Zwift racing can be. While some details are still being ironed out, what is taking shape bares little resemblance to the pro-level Zwift racing of past years. Elite team racing is being completely decoupled from Zwift Racing League and rebranded as “Zwift Grand Prix” . . . . It’s a major shift from the past two years, when the elite-level “Premier League” teams would race a day before the community teams, riding the same Zwift Racing League route as the community riders.

In fairness to Zwift, the shift came at an inflection point in the sport. MyWhoosh was becoming a bigger player in the space, having just announced that its weekly prize purse for Sunday Race Club would be awarded every week rather than just for the monthly finals. The MyWhoosh model for growing the sport was never connected to community racing: it came on the scene throwing around large prize pools to attract top riders on to the platform. The growth of MyWhoosh at this time, coupled with increased interest coming off of the Covid boom, meant that the virtual cycling was professionalizing. Zwift was trying to be proactive and maintain its hegemony in the space, and creating a dedicated professional league seemed to be the way to do it. But in shifting from ZPD to ZGP, the race lost touch with its community roots - the very thing that had made it such a success in the first place.

Race Formats

The corollary to this was that ZGP ushered in a number of new, experimental racing formats. Again from the Zwift Insider article:

[Decoupling ZGP from ZRL] should allow the elite events to feature a fresh set of race formats that are “uniquely esports”, creating a more varied and exciting experience for racers and audience members alike.

In principle, this was a good idea. One of the best things about cycling e-sports is the innovative formats the virtual environment offers. But there needs to be a limiting principle to all this: platforms can get as adventurous as they want, but fans still need to be able to easily understand what they are watching.

Ultimately, Zwift went too far in the experimental direction. The below examples get into this more, but simply put fans got confused. And when fans get confused, they tune out.

Investment in Broadcasts

To be clear, this isn’t to say some of the formats weren’t a wild success or that Zwift should stop introducing new race formats. It absolutely should! For example, the race format introduced in Stage 2 of the ‘22-’23 ZGP was initially pretty confusing (see the second example below). But to Zwift’s credit, it recognized those mistakes, refined the format, and later used it for the UCI World Championship. And in my opinion, that has been the best World Championship so far. But there has to be an understanding that as complexity increases, so does the burden on the platform to engage fans, explain the format, and perhaps most importantly, create a broadcast that lets viewers easily digest what is happening at each second of the race.

Publication of Results

This is perhaps the most inexplicable one: for some reason, Zwift… stopped publishing race results. It was kind of maddening! In building our website, some of the hardest results to find (and where we are most certain there are mistakes) are for the last season of ZGP. I could spill a lot of ink on this, but it’s probably best to just let this post from the Zwift Forums do the talking:

Thankfully, there is now a solution: our site has all these race results! But boy, they weren’t easy to find.

Some Examples

So how did these mistakes affect the racing? Here are some tangible examples.

‘22-’23 Women’s ZGP Final

Starting with the highest profile case. The first season of ZGP consisted of both a regular season and a finals. The first six stages allowed all teams to compete, but stage seven - the finals - included only the top five teams from the regular season. The team that scored the most points in the finals would be crowned ZGP champion.

Actually a pretty fun format. But here’s what happened: Wahoo Le Col and the Aeonian Race Team had been duking it out all season, finishing one-two in the regular season standings. In the finals, Aeonian built up a commanding nine point lead over Wahoo Le Col through picking off intermediate sprint and QOM points early in the race. As the teams approached the finish line, announcers Dave and Nathan played out some of the possibilities, including the potential for a three-way tie between Aeonian, Wahoo Le Col, and Virginia’s Blue Ridge Twenty24. At one point, Nathan mentioned in passing that in an event of a tie, he would think that whoever was first across the line at the end of the race would receive the tiebreaker.

The three-way tie didn’t happen. But a two-way tie did. Kathrin Fuhrer and Laura Simenc crossed the line in first and second, bringing Wahoo Le Col into a 9-9 tie with Aeonian. But it quickly became clear that no one really knew what the tiebreaker was. “What does the tiebreaker say,” Nathan asked at one point as the hosts waited for confirmation from Zwift.

When the results came up on the screen, Aeonian was in first and Wahoo Le Col in second. Both with nine points. Why? Neither Dave nor Nathan were sure initially. But finally word came in from Zwift that the tiebreaker started with the first segment, and because Aeonian’s Polona Itkin had crossed the line first in that segment the title went to them.

To be clear, zero percent of this is on Dave and Nathan. It seems quite clear that Zwift had just… put them in an impossible position by not prepping the broadcast for the possibility of a tie. And so while the end of the inaugural women’s Grand Prix had been truly incredible - all you could ask for, really - it was undermined by very real confusion as to who, you know, had actually won the darn race.

Stage 2 of the ‘22'-’23 ZGP - The Golden Tickets

The “Team Elimination Omnium” stage the inaugural ZGP featured one of the most convoluted formats Zwift has ever used. Basically, it had three rounds. Race one started with 60 riders, and the top 30 advanced to the second round. Of the 30 riders in the second round, the top 10 then advanced to the final. But there was a wrinkle: “golden ticket” intermediate banners in the first two stages. Say a rider won a golden ticket in round one, but finished outside the top 30. They would still advance, and whoever finished 30th wouldn’t.

The problem was that point totals for riders only accounted for how the rider finished. In other words, while getting a golden ticket moved you to the next round, it didn’t actually score any points for your team. This led to a wild amount of confusion, since the format made it seem as if golden tickets were as critically important but in practice they ended up being worth very little.

The end of the second round of the women’s race crystallized this confusion. Kristen Kulchinsky had already secured herself a golden ticket, and in the final climb ended up at the head of a small group of women seeking to make it through to the finals. The way the points worked for the second round was that the top ten riders would all get the same amount - 21. So really, there was absolutely no reason for Kulchinsky to push the pace on the climb, since first was as good as tenth for her.

But the complexity of the format meant that a lot of fans didn’t realize this. In the YouTube comment section, the Zwift Insider account correctly identified that Kulchinsky’s golden ticket was essentially worthless at this point, since the goal was to accumulate points and not just advance to the next round. But not realizing that the top ten riders all scored the same amount of points - and frankly, I hadn’t realized this either - Zwift Insider also commented that Kulchinsky should be aggressive on the climb rather than save her energy.

Of course, as Dave pointed out on the broadcast, this was precisely the wrong strategy. And from a fan perspective, while it’s fun to debate strategy, it isn’t fun to be midway through a race and still not really understand the points system and the different incentives the format creates for riders. As Liz Van Houweling pointed out afterward, summarizing the race for The Zommunique:

I felt there was a lot that the organizers could have improved. The format was fine, but the way they awarded golden tickets and points seemed to provide little incentive for aggressive racing.

There was no point in wasting too much energy for higher places in the first race because the top 30 all got the same points. One could argue that it made the golden tickets even less valuable because expending energy there might mean you’d be outside the top 30 and receive fewer points. Maybe award EXTRA points in going for the golden ticket? And then do a descending points distribution across the finish line, so people have the motivation to try harder?

The last race also provided very few points overall when it should have been the pinnacle of the entire day! The entire points system just seemed a bit strange to me. But we knew what it was like before the race, so we played the game accordingly!

Fans didn’t though. And that was a real problem.

Up the Alpe - ‘23-’24 ZGP Stage 2

The second stage of the final ZGP was a simple format: climb Alpe de Zwift, with three intermediate sprint locations offering additional points outside of a rider’s finishing position. But in the broadcast they missed half of the intermediate sprints and technical issues in the broadcast at times made tracking points and rider positions difficult.⁸ Moreover, it was never clear how points were cascaded down to riders finishing just inside the time cut. Put this all together, and the comment section to the broadcast got… a little frustrated, to say the least.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Way too long of a post as to why ZPD was so great - and the issues in transitioning to ZGP that helped lead to its demise. Next week, we’ll take all this and look into the future: how can Zwift apply the lessons learned from the ZPD/ZGP experience to make professional racing on its platform as good as possible moving forward?

1. “From a fan perspective” is the critical phrase here: riders weren’t really getting paid much during this era. That’s a topic for another day, and is not addressed in this post. Though maybe it’s worth at least making one hopefully uncontroversial statement here: in the abstract, riders getting paid for their efforts is, you know, a good thing!

2. In our race database, we classify ZPD and ZGP as the same race in light of the continuity between the two. For the purposes of this post though, ZPD and ZGP are differentiated because of certain changes Zwift made to the format when switching between the two that were detrimental to the race.

3. And not just because of the trainer inaccuracy fiasco that led Zwift to pause ZWS after just three stages. That one wasn’t really on Zwift.

4. Go Rainbow Rouleurs!

5. Sorry, Europeans. At the moment, it seems like a slim majority of our subscribers are American. I promise that if the balance shifts we will start calling it football.

6. For some older videos above 10,000 views, YouTube only shows the number of views rounded to the thousand, e.g., 22k, 23k, etc. Under 10,000, it is to the hundred. Hence, a lot of these figures are an approximation. For races where the men and women raced on different days (the ‘22-’23 ZGP and some of the ‘23-’24 ZGP), viewership numbers for both broadcasts are added together. Obviously, the number of views is as of early January 2025 and will continue to increase over time.

7. The first three UCI World Championships, all with well over 100,000 viewers, were held on Zwift. And yes, that is… a massive difference in viewership between the first three editions and the fourth. Not great. But a topic for another day. The 48,900 number for that race is the sum of the English, French, and Arabic MyWhoosh broadcasts on YouTube.

8. See 27:20, 1:47:30, and 2:04:25 in the hyperlinked YouTube video.