Well, it’s finally launch day! For the past year and a half, we’ve been hard at work creating Pro E Cycling.1 Since you’ve never heard of us, we figured we’d write up this introductory post to give you a sense of who we are and what you can expect if you sign up to hear our weekly musings about the world of professional virtual cycling.2
Pro E Cycling has two components:
The first is our website, where we maintain a comprehensive database of professional race results and rider ranking system. If you are familiar with high-level virtual cycling, one of the key issues is the lack of a unified, cross-platform professional race calendar and ranking system. Chris Schwenker over at The Zommunique has been beating this drum for years now.3
So, well, we’ve spent the past year and a half making one. To state the obvious up front: this was an incredibly difficult endeavor. The first step was to go back through all the top races since the professional Zwift scene began materializing 7-8 years ago and come up with criteria for which races would count as “professional” and therefore be included in our rider ranking system. You can read more about that process on our website.
Next, we had to go through and collect results for each of these races. This was a pretty painstaking, manual process that involved a lot of rewatching old races (sort of fun at first, less so later on). You can see all these race results on our website here.
Finally, we had to create the ranking system to rank riders. At first, we set out to create a simple, easy-to-understood system. But because we needed a system that worked for the broad range of formats used in virtual cycling races (scratch races, point races, etc.), that proved difficult. Still, after a lot of thought and retooling, we think we ended up with a points system that makes a lot of sense and actually works. We are sure you won’t agree with every decision we made, but you can read about the ranking system on our website here.
Our goal with all this is to become the go-to source for professional virtual cycling fans to view race results and rider rankings. We also (humbly) think our race selection criteria and ranking system do a great job of selecting only the top-level races and ranking riders based on their performance on each of them. That being said, we’ve intentionally launched our site in beta mode and are actively soliciting feedback from the community. If you have any thoughts - good, bad, or terrible - about our system, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at info@proecycling.com.
The second component is this blog. Since this is what we are trying to convince you to subscribe to (and hopefully pay for? maybe?), we probably should’ve started here. Oh well.
Our intent is to be fully reader-supported. You’ll notice that there are no ads on our website. That was intentional - we aren’t opposed to running ads for brands we believe share our values, but we strongly prefer to operate with your support. Subscribing to this newsletter will help us continue to publish it and maintain and build out the website.
We totally get it if you aren’t able to support us with a paid subscription at this point. If that is the case, we’d still strongly encourage you to subscribe for free. We plan to publish enough free content to make it worth your while!
We also are fully independent and will never take money from any platforms we are covering. Because of that, we will be honest when platforms do things with which we disagree.4
So what kind of content can you expect from us if you subscribe? Well, it’s a bit TBD, but broadly should fall into a few buckets:
Coverage and analysis of professional virtual cycling races;
The same for some of the more popular community races (e.g., Zwift Racing League) in which we know a lot of our readers race;
Platform news - this should get pretty juicy in the next few years;
Site discussions (changes, improvements we make to our race selection, ranking system, etc.);
Reader mailbags: send us questions and any feedback/suggestions you have at info@proecycling.com; and
Pretty much anything else you think we should be covering - again, our suggestion box is the email above.
That’s it for now. We plan to release one newsletter per week at minimum on Tuesdays, with additional publications as things happen. Stay tuned for the first in a few days, and in the meantime smash the subscribe button below!
Well, at least hard at work from time to time. Having kids doesn’t really help move things along, and we’ve also got real jobs, so…
There’s a decent chance you’ve started reading this post and are thinking, um, what exactly is virtual cycling, let alone “professional” virtual cycling? It’s a fair question, and we realize that as we write this the sport remains quite niche.
In brief though, virtual cycling is competitive indoor cycling, where riders race against one another by riding on bikes hooked up to smart trainers that control on-screen avatars. Races occur on one of many virtual platforms - Zwift and MyWhoosh are the main ones at the moment, though there are several others. Professional virtual cycling is the highest level of competition on these platforms.
If you aren’t subscribed to The Virtual Velo Podcast, where Chris and Emma Martin break down the virtual racing world each week, please go subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform. This post will still be here when you get back.
One of the first series of articles we plan to publish here will dig into how Zwift messed up the Zwift Grand Prix and why - despite those failings - it should probably ditch the Zwift World Series and go back to the Grand Prix. That will be one of our first paywalled posts, so a bit of a teaser to induce you to subscribe!