Mailbag! Trainers, How to Watch Races, and More
Blog #23
Now that Zwift World Series results have finally been verified and the virtual cycling season has come to an end, I thought this would be a great time to dig into the mailbag and answer some reader questions.
As a reminder, one of the perks of being a paid subscriber is that I guarantee a response to all your questions.1 A friend pointed out to me that I haven’t placed any limits on this guarantee, and asked if they could make me respond to anything they wanted if they subscribed… So that might have been an oversight, but for now I haven’t had to place any restrictions on questions because everything I got was really good!2
So why did you start the site? What are your objectives here?
I’m a little embarrassed to say that I hadn’t really thought about this in depth before I launched the Pro E Cycling website. The way it started was pretty organic. Around the 2022-2023 era, I got really into virtual cycling. I was racing a lot myself, but I was also following the professional races, listening to The Wrap religiously, that sort of thing.
No matter where I looked though, I couldn’t find a PCS-like resource tracking the history of the sport. Zwift was awful (no offense) at documenting elite-level racing; ZwiftPower was great for community rankings but didn’t really work for the pros; and the emergence of MyWhoosh during that era meant that even if Zwift had done all this well the sport had moved past its single-platform era and this data would need to be compiled by a third party.
Then there’s also the fact that I’m just a massive nerd. When I was a kid, I had diaries where I meticulously cut and pasted Mets stats and articles for every game of the season. So as I got more into cycling esports, it just bothered me that there wasn’t a resource for this stuff.
I started by just doing a bunch of research into the history of cycling esports and coming up with a definition for what races were actually “professional.” It sort of snowballed from there - I started tracking down old results and compiling them in spreadsheets. And because a good chunk of those have disappeared from the internet, I started rewatching old races to collect those results as well.
Anyway, it pretty quickly became clear that I should publish this stuff somewhere, which led me to the website. This blog sort of felt inevitable after that - there are already great resources covering the sport from a journalistic perspective, but I still thought it would be fun to write a bit myself.
Now that I’ve actually gotten this thing up and running though, I think the website itself has three main objectives:
Serve as a repository for the history of cycling esports. That doesn’t exist anywhere else, and if you ever want easy access to the results of the Covid-era Tour of Watopia Pro-Am, we’ve got you!
Create and maintain a ranking system for the sport. There is no other existing cross-platform ranking system for professional cycling esports. Cycling ranking systems are a source of constant fascination for me, and I put a lot of thought into creating ours.
Have some fun, promote the sport, and help it grow. I guess that’s where the blog comes in as well. Or I just need an outlet for my bad takes 😁
How do you watch all these races???
I’m not ashamed to admit that I watch a lot of races after the fact. Every pro race, at the moment, is broadcast live on YouTube, and for better or worse it’s pretty easy to avoid spoilers if you can’t watch live.
I dunno, I feel like it’s fair to critique me for this. But my life is pretty busy. I have family obligations or am outside riding when the races are on live. As long as I don’t know the results, it works for me to watch the next evening curled up in bed with a cup of hot tea.
What trainers do the pros ride?
I got this question during Zwift Games, and during the broadcasts spent an inordinate amount of time squinting at the rider cam in the corner of the screen trying to figure out what people were riding. That was a fool’s errand, and it turns out there’s a much easier way.
As an initial matter, the pros are limited to certain (very expensive) trainers for elite races. The current Zwift rulebook, released for Zwift Games on February 20, 2025, allows riders to compete on only the following trainers. These are the exact same set of trainers the current version of the MyWhoosh rulebook allows for elite racers:
Wahoo
Kickr (v5, v6, or Move)
Kickr Bike (v1, v2, or Shift)
Elite
Justo or Justo 2
Garmin Tacx
Neo (2, 2T, or 3M)
Neo (Bike or Bike Plus)
Of course, riders at the pro level are also required to dual record. Interestingly though, the requirements for secondary power sources are much more lax. Zwift allows riders to use “any commercially available crank or pedal based power meter to measure and record secondary power,” but notes that while their “ruleset does not currently outline an approved list of power meters . . . it is anticipated that further regulations relating to power meters will be added at a later date.” The MyWhoosh rulebook takes a similar approach. Although it talks about “approved crank or pedal-based power meter[s],” I’m not aware of any actual list and it appears the requirements for “approval” are simply that the power meter connects to MyWhoosh and isn’t modified from the factory slope settings.
So, to actually answer the reader question, here is a list of all the setups from some of the top pro riders that I’ve been able to track down. To be honest, I’m a little surprised as to how Wahoo-dominant the list is. Favero too on the secondary side, though a bit less so:3
Although I haven’t guaranteed a timeline - apologies (you know who you are, and I’m very sorry it took me this long to do a mailbag column 😁)!
I’ve edited the text of the questions a bit just to make the column flow a bit more cohesively. Substance is the same though.
Sources for all these are from poking around on ZwiftPower, where all this information is publicly available if you have enough patience to look for it! Where I found multiple trainers or secondary sources for a particular rider, I list the equipment from the most recent professional race.
Great job! Thanks