Catching Up on a Whole Crapton of News - A Megapost

Blog #42

Wow, so much has happened since we last spoke just prior to the UCI World Championship semi-finals. Turns out a full-time job, kid, and marathon training really puts blogging on the back burner - sorry about that!¹

Anyway, we’ve got four big stories to break down and one long post to do it. Specifically, below the fold we get into: (i) semifinals results; (ii) more detail confusion on how the qualification system worked to get into those semifinals; (iii) the potential for new UCI-sanctioned races this year; and (iv) an exciting new race series I’m pumped to talk more about.

Semifinal Results

Let’s start with the results. Here is the list of riders making it through to the November 15 finals in Abu Dhabi, listed in order of their current ranking:²

Notable Takeaways

There aren’t a *ton* of surprises here.

As an initial matter, we’ve talked before about how our current ranking system is a lagging indicator of success. Given how few “pro” virtual races occur each season, it accounts for results over the past two calendar years and is slow to recognize newcomers or folks who don’t race too frequently. For example, it was only two months ago that Kate McCarthy took over the number one spot from Kathrin Fuhrer, despite it being obvious for about a year now that she’s the best rider in the women’s peloton (and Fuhrer is still ranked one spot above Gabriella Guerra, who is clearly the best rider in the non-McCarthy division).

So the number of non-ranked or lower-ranked riders that have made it through is not, in and of itself, noteworthy.³ This is especially true given that a number of top riders did not race in the semis, particularly on the women’s side. Those female riders include:

• Fuhrer (#2 - unclear to me why she didn’t race)

• Lou Bates (#5 - doesn’t really race on MyWhoosh much)

• Merle Brunnee (#8 - the German federation is pushing to get her a wild card spot in the finals. She was 7th in 2024, but had to miss the semi-finals due to her participation in the Ironman World Championships. Casual, you know, I wish I could say I miss races because I’m that impressive)

• Selene Colombi (#9 - unclear to me why she didn’t race)

• Illi Gardner (#11 - probably off climbing mountains at an insane pace)

• Katie Hill (#12), Sandrine Etienne (#13), Arielle Verhaaren (#14), Liz Van Houweling (#15), Stefanie Sydlik (#17), and Mary Wilkinson (#19) all didn’t race as well, for reasons I’m not aware.

Indeed, the highest ranked rider on the women’s side to race and not make it through was Emma Belforth (#19), who finished a disappointing 40th. But given the level of talent that didn’t race, the list of riders that made it through on the women’s side was… pretty predictable. Sure, there were riders at the margins who I maybe would have picked to make it through and didn’t (Alice Lethbridge (#27), Kelsey Jade Van Schoor (NR), Kimberly Hoekstra (NR), and Tiffany Penner (NR)), and of course a couple who made the field on the lower end that I didn’t expect to see, but these are best described the mild surprises you’d expect to have in such a crowded field, not paradigm-shifting upsets that make me reconsider what will happen in the finals.

On the men’s side, there were also some top riders that sat out. These include:

• Lionel Vujasin (#5 - not clear why)

• Freddy Ovett (#8 - he’s a Zwift man)

• Martin Maertens (#11 - but he retired. Per Pro E Cycling official policy though, all hail Maertens every time he is mentioned on the blog)

• Mickael Plantureux (#12 - not clear why)

• Michael Knudsen (#15 - also not clear why)

• Saeid Safarzadeh (#16 - same)

• Jo Pirotte (#19 - same)

Similar to the women’s side, with these riders sitting out there weren’t a whole bunch of massive surprises here. I’d say the biggest one was Daniel Turek (#10) finishing outside the top twenty. That was genuinely a bit of a shock to me. Perhaps you could say Neal Fryett (#2) as well, but he’s never had much success on MyWhoosh.⁴ I probably would’ve picked Geoffrey Millour (#32) and Johan Norén (#22) to get in as well, but those are more in the mild surprise category.

At any rate - the field is set!⁵ We’ll have a full preview of the finals next month, and I can’t. freaking. wait.

Nobody Knows How to Qualify for Worlds… Still

We’ve been following the chaos of the broken qualification system for the semi-finals for a while now, and I just wanted to put a coda on it since some of you have reached out to ask which of the riders in the semis had qualified through the open public qualifiers.

The short answer is that nobody, not even MyWhoosh, seems to know.

I reached out to MyWhoosh for the list, since they had told me previously that they had notified all riders who had qualified through the public pathway. At first, they said there would be “[n]o issue at all sharing,” but noted that, given the overlap between the federation qualification system and the public one, there was some ambiguity as to how which pathway certain riders qualified. From MyWhoosh:

[T]here isn’t a completely clear-cut answer to your question.

A good example is Adrian Alvar[a]do from Chile — Chile didn’t have a federation allocation, but could have applied for a UCI spot. Adrian qualified through a public entry, so it raises the question: should he be classified as a public qualifier or a UCI rider?

There are other similar examples.

To be honest, I found this example a bit puzzling. If Chile didn’t actually apply for the UCI spot and nominate Alvarado, then… he earned his spot through the public qualifier. If Chile did take the initiative and apply/nominate him, then he is not a public qualifier.

Y’all can tell me in the comments if I’m being obtuse or unfair here, but I think this is pretty straightforward?

Regardless, after promising to provide the list of publicly-qualified riders, MyWhoosh eventually declined to do so citing “the high volume of requests” and because “the list requires further segmentation based on specific criteria.”

For me, my (completely speculative) takeaway here seems to be that, as the UCI and MyWhoosh put together the semi-finals field and struggled to actually get many of the federations to actually participate and take initiative, the line between the federation pathway and the public one dissolved. MyWhoosh seems to be admitting as much with the Alvarado example and the note that the list of public qualifiers would need to be “further segmented” to be shared.

At this point, the qualification process is done and dusted, and it is what it is. But it sort of makes a mockery of the terms “open” and “public” qualifier when (i) there are no defined criteria ex-ante to allow riders to know what they have to do to qualify; and (ii) even after the fact, there is a refusal to actually make the results public or even bother to explain the criteria through which riders were selected.⁶

More UCI-Sanctioned Races???

On to some better news though: a couple of weeks ago, UCI Esports coordinator Jacob Fraser went on the Virtual Velo Podcast to discuss the upcoming World Championships and the future of the sport. The whole episode is worth a listen, but for the purposes of this post one thing jumped out: Fraser’s guarantee that the UCI will sanction more racing in the coming year:

I would make a strong statement that in 2026 we will see a growth or [UCI] sanctioned racing outside of what we currently have, which is our World Championship event every year.

Of course, I have thoughts 😁

• First, I want to establish up front that at the end of the day, any expansion of UCI-sanctioned esports racing is a step forward for the sport. We can quibble about a whole bunch of stuff (see the below bullets), but if the UCI is sanctioning more racing it will go a long way towards legitimizing the sport. That’s… just the cycling world we live in.

  • That being said, I’m somewhat skeptical this will actually happen in 2026. The UCI has been publicly promising something of the sort for well over two years now (and there have been rumors of such plans for even longer), but it has yet to come to fruition.

    • There are good reasons for this - trainer accuracy issues first among them.⁷ But the UCI has previously hinted that its trainer homologation program and the launch “standardized, verified hardware” (in the words of MyWhoosh) is a prerequisite to an expanded race calendar. We’ve certainly seen big, Boilmaker-led steps in that regard in preparation for the upcoming World Championships, but with the first version of “commercially available hardware homologation” not expected until 2026 at the earliest - and the UCI’s stated desire to sort out independent performance verification before sanctioning more racing - I’m not exactly seeing how that timeline happens by the end of next year. The UCI famously moves at… well… a snail’s pace when it comes to cycling esports, and MyWhoosh currently handles performance verification in house.

    • Putting it more bluntly: we’ve been talking about the UCI’s three pillar approach to the future of cycling esports for years now: (i) trainer homologation; (ii) independent performance verification; and (iii) more UCI-sanctioned racing. None of those have been fully achieved as of yet, and with (i) and (ii) seemingly prerequisites for (iii) I struggle to see how we get all the way there by the end of 2026 unless the UCI jumps to (iii) before (i) and (ii) are fully sorted.

      • I hope I’m wrong though! And if I am, I’ll eat crow. I certainly have made my share of bad predictions on this blog 😁

    • The second thing I’m worried about is that the launch of additional UCI-sanctioned racing will just be a redux of the 2023 World Championship bidding process: namely, MyWhoosh pays the UCI a bunch of money to essentially license their logo and put on races. Quoting DC Rainmaker on the 2023 World Championship bidding process:

      [O]ne has to remember, this is simply a paid bidding for this event . . . . MyWhoosh doesn’t have th[e] sorts of financial constraints [that Zwift does]. Based in the UAE, MyWhoosh is paired with the country’s heavy investment in cycling events over the next 6 years . . . . The point here being, everything about these selections are driven by money (and connections), not functionality or user bases.

    • Look, if that’s what the expansion of the UCI-sanctioned race calendar looks like, it would still be a net plus for the sport. But it would be a massive missed opportunity to expand the sport beyond the single-platform dominance MyWhoosh has consolidated with its onslaught of unlimited funding over the past few years.

PRESTIGE

Let’s. F@&*ing. Go.

Last week, Restart Esports p/b Alex Coh Coaching, Leadout Esports, and ZMS Esports Studio announced the launch of Prestige: Season One.

I’ve been waiting for this launch for a long time. The state of elite-level cycling esports on Zwift has been decimated in the past year. To make an eight-year long story short: we had organically grown elite racing on Zwift. Then, Zwift got involved and brought it to a new level (good) while also crowding out community-built elite racing, which largely ceded that ground to Zwift to organize, govern, and run (not necessarily an issue while Zwift was still invested). Against this backdrop though, Zwift’s exit from the space earlier this year left an elite-racing chasm on the platform that it was unclear would be filled.

And so the community is back to building up the sport on Zwift from scratch. Enter Prestige. The organizers are pretty honest about this goal in the race book: in the first season, they hope to “lay a foundation of high standards in community hosted premier tier racing.”

Prestige builds on the success of last year’s Restart Invitational, which filled the elite racing niche on Zwift during the Zwift World Series pause. I’ll be following the series in depth on this blog moving forward, so won’t go into all the details here. But for the time being, check out the race site. And look: the prize money is modest. You’ve got to pay to join. I don’t know if the series will count as “professional” for the purposes of our site.

But… who gives a s&%$? This is what it looks like to re-grow the sport on Zwift and turn it back into the thing we all fell in love with in the first place. And I am so freaking here for it.

1. And updating the website. I know I’m behind… sorry all.

2. You can see the full list of current rankings for women and men on the site.

3. Two good examples of this on the men’s side are Yunfei Wu - the only rider who can really claim to keep up with Jason Osborne and Michael Vink these days in SRC - being only ranked 20th because of how recently he’s come on to the SRC scene, and Pawel Scierski, a young, Pucker-like Polish rider who impressed in the MyWhoosh Championships but remains unranked.

4. Outside of a single top ten in a MyWhoosh Championship stage this year, Fryett has yet to have any notable results on MyWhoosh (maybe second to Hayden Pucker in the U.S. national championships, but there wasn’t too much competition for that spot).

5. Though there is always the possibility of additional wild cards being added.

6. As a side note, I’ve spent way too much combing through the semi-finals start list to try to figure out who the public qualifiers were, but there’s just too much uncertainty to even make educated guesses.

7. Unless otherwise noted, citations in this bullet are all to this Escape Collective piece by Chris Schwenker, which I highly commend. I’ve omitted hyperlinks herein to this piece, just because it would be necessary for every word and quote.