MyWhoosh to Revive Platform Championship, $1m Prize Purse
Blog #25
Hey all! The blog will be back on Tuesday with our regularly scheduled programming, but for now I wanted to cut into your weekend with a big announcement: MyWhoosh confirmed today that it is reviving its platform championship.
As you might recall, the MyWhoosh Championship was first held in 2023, but fizzled out as MyWhoosh shifted its focus to Sunday Race Club (“SRC”) and the UCI World Championship, which moved over to MyWhoosh from Zwift in 2024. As such, the event did not take place in 2024, and wasn’t scheduled to occur in 2025 either. As of last week, it was a dead event: Zwift had its platform championship in Zwift Games, and MyWhoosh seemed content to parry that by hosting the UCI World Championship for at least the next two years.
But in a surprise move, MyWhoosh quietly posted a page for the MyWhoosh Championship 2025, and confirmed today that the race will indeed be taking place again this summer from August 12-19. Details are still falling into place, and we don’t have start lists yet, but below is what we know along with some initial reactions.
Race Format
You might recall that the format for the inaugural MyWhoosh Championship in 2023 was pretty much identical to that of a traditional road stage race: there were seven stages in eight days, GC and team results based on time, and points-based sprint and K/QOM jerseys.
The 2025 version will stick to that same basic approach, with some minor additions. There will again be seven stages in eight days (including one time trial, though it’s not clear if it’s a TTT or ITT). GC will be time based, and the overall sprint and K/QOM jerseys will be complemented by stage-specific sprint and climb competitions. Teams can have up to six riders, and the top three riders per team in each stage will count towards the team’s results.1 Riders are required to compete in every prior stage to be eligible to score team points and receive prize money.
You can see the stage profiles here, but the TL;DR is that they range from 55 to 83.4 km for the men and 43.2 to 65 km for the women (for non-TT stages), include a mix of flat, hilly, and mountainous terrain, and showcase a bunch of different MyWhoosh words. It’s nothing unexpected if you are familiar with the SRC courses.
Prize Money
The headline here is the $1 million prize purse. Yes, yes, MyWhoosh seemingly has unlimited pockets. The $1 million is across all six categories though. For the pros (which, after all, is what we care about on this blog), the pool is $197,600 by my math.
But it’s the way that MyWhoosh has chosen to allocate the prize money within that pool that is super interesting here - it is heavily focused on team and GC competitions, rather than stage results:
Assuming that a team splits the team prize pot equally and races with the maximum of six riders, the take-home share for a rider on the winning team would be $3,887.50 - worth more than a 7th place finish in GC. It’s pretty clear MyWhoosh is trying to tilt the scales here towards the team competition, and I definitely don’t hate it.
Initial Hot Takes
I’m going to nitpick a bit here, because that’s what I do, but I want to be clear about the bottom line up front: this is a massive win for the continued professionalization of virtual cycling. The pro race calendar is really fattening up - in addition to the UCI World Championship, the two major platforms now have their own platform championships (Zwift Games and the MyWhoosh Championship), along with what I’ll call secondary professional races (Zwift World Series and SRC, though I know some folks will disagree with me classifying SRC as such). Just awesome.
Anyway, some other hot takes, in no particular order:
MyWhoosh hasn’t actually said whether or not they intend to hold the race past 2025, but my best guess is that they will. It wouldn’t really make sense to relaunch their platform championship as a one-off event.
If we do see the MyWhoosh Championship again in future years, I wonder what that means for the future of UCI and IOC cycling esports events. It’s no secret that MyWhoosh wants to host those events and has the money to win the bids. This is entirely speculative, but the fact that MyWhoosh is instead plowing funds into reviving its own platform championships probably doesn’t bode well for seeing either the UCI or IOC put on additional virtual cycling events in the next couple of years.
Requiring riders to race every prior stage to receive prize money or contribute to the team score is brilliant and needs to happen for every other pro-level virtual race.
My read on this is that it’ll force races to play out exactly like road races do. Riders can no longer skip stages, though if they drop out midway through the race due to injury or another reason they’ll keep prize money from previous stage results and those results will still count for the team.
You can see the disaster that was the Zwift Games and Zwift World Series start lists and participation levels for why this rule is necessary.
I hope the time trial is an ITT rather than a TTT, only because we don’t really see those in virtual cycling and it would be kind of fun!
On a more critical note, I think the way to emphasize team racing is through structure, not money.2 Points races naturally promote team-centric racing in a way that time-based events just don’t. Couple that with the MyWhoosh drafting dynamics that seem to be less favorable to team tactics, and I worry that the attempt to emphasize team racing here might fall flat.
That being said, we still don’t have a firm sense of how the team competition is going to work here, so it’s still a bit TBD.
On a similar note, I’d also love to see MyWhoosh experiment with different formats in its non-UCI World Championship races. The SRC format has, for me at least, gotten a bit stale, and I’d love to see some intermediate sprints or K/QOMs impact GC or stage results, à la Zwift Games 2025.
On timing: recognizing my northern hemisphere/temperate climate bias, it’s a little weird having a virtual cycling event in August, no?
And I’ll finish with what might be the most important factor: start lists. In 2023, MyWhoosh was still getting off the ground, and the level of competition in the first MyWhoosh Championship wasn’t exactly the most impressive even with the $1 million prize pool (particularly on the women’s side, where only nine riders qualified for GC). MyWhoosh has come a longgg way since then, but we are going to be able to tell a TON about how successful MyWhoosh Championship v2.0 will be just by seeing the start lists. I have a feeling it’ll be much better this time around.
That’s all for now. You can bet we will be following the race in detail moving forward. Subscribe so you don’t miss it - and cheers!
I assume this will be time-based as well (as it was in 2023), but the materials MyWhoosh has on its site aren’t clear and talk about team “score” rather than time.
Or, you know, through a TTT rather than an ITT 😁