The Summer of MyWhoosh
Blog #31
The past month has been a massive coup for MyWhoosh in the platform wars. First, it announced the revival of its platform championship. Then, Zwift took a step back from the elite cycling game by canceling the Zwift World Series. Meanwhile, MyWhoosh has continued to move forward with releasing dates, formats, and qualifiers for the UCI World Championship this fall. And all this while being glued to Tadej’s butt as he zooms away from the peloton on his way to his fourth Tour de France.1
We’ve already discussed the macro impacts of these pretty seismic shifts on the landscape of professional cycling esports, and I’d encourage you to read that post below if you haven’t already. This post will be focused entirely on the fun stuff: it’s the northern hemisphere summer and ostensibly the “offseason” for indoor riding, but there’s going to be some freaking awesome racing going on in the coming month.
The Schedule
Let’s start with the schedule, since it’s jam-packed and keeping track of it all is tough. Here are all the races I’ll be watching over the next month, i.e., all the races that we at Pro E Cycling count towards our rankings or are qualifiers for the biggest race of them all, the UCI World Championship.
Sunday, July 27: Sunday Race Club - Monthly Finals
Wednesday, August 6: UCI World Championship Open Qualifier 1 - Asia-Pacific & Europe
Friday, August 8: UCI World Championship Open Qualifier 2 - Europe & Americas
August 12-19: MyWhoosh Championship - 7 Stages
Friday, August 22: UCI World Championship Open Qualifier 3 - Asia-Pacific & Europe
Wednesday, August 27: UCI World Championship Open Qualifier 4 - Europe & Americas
Sunday, August 31: Sunday Race Club - Monthly Finals
So, yeah. It’s officially the summer of MyWhoosh.
Some Quick Hit Previews
So let’s go through what we can expect from each of these race series in the coming month plus. I’m not going to discuss the MyWhoosh Championship here though - that preview merits its own post(s).
Sunday Race Club
Starting with the easiest of the lot. At some point I want to write a full-length feature on what SRC has become and where it might go. But for now I’ll just say that it’s a bit like what some view as the grind of a long baseball season - you’re happy it’s there, and will occasionally tune in throughout the summer, but the frequency of the races games makes each individual one not exactly appointment viewing.2
For me, I’ve fallen into the pattern of mostly just sticking to watching the monthly finals. But even those have become a bit mechanical and predictable - Kate McCarthy has taken eight of the ten races this year (and eight of the nine she’s raced), and hasn’t lost since January. Jason Osborne, for his part, has won seven of ten (and seven of the nine in which he’s participated), and hasn’t lost since February.
I expect that success to continue in the July finals this weekend. Both the men and women will take on a course that culminates with the Jebel Hafeet climb (9.5 km at 7%). It’s basically a shorter version of the Mont Ventoux stage we just saw in the TDF - flat, flat, flat, and then a massive climb. That course is tailor-made for Osborne and McCarthy (maybe slightly more for Osborne), and both riders seem poised to take home another win. We’ll see what the August finals course looks like in a week or so, but absent a purely flat sprint stage that would put Osborne at a disadvantage (which MyWhoosh doesn’t really do for SRC) there really isn’t a profile that would make these two lose their status as favorites going in.
UCI World Championship - Open Qualifiers
Before we get in to actually previewing these four races, it’s worth a quick reminder on the qualification path for the 20+ riders that will take the stage in Abu Dhabi on November 15. There are basically four steps:
National Federation Nomination
The first step in the process for allocating spots in the semi-finals is through the national federations. The UCI uses a complicated formula to determine the quotas each federation gets, but the upshot is that approximately 87% of the 150 spots in the semi-finals3 will be taken up by riders nominated by their federations and the defending world champions (surprise, surprise, McCarthy and Osborne). Here are the quotas, i.e., the number of riders each federation can nominate through to the semi-finals:
Image: UCI
Open Qualifiers
The remaining 20ish spots in the semi-finals will be allocated through the four open qualifier races that will take place this month. It’s a bit frustrating that we don’t know how many riders from each of the four races will qualify yet, but the UCI says that “[t]he number of slots for each race will be announced [at some point] before the first race.” So let’s go with ~5 per race for now, since that number is what makes the math work.
Semi-Finals
The roughly 150 riders will then race in the October 3 semi-finals, and…
Finals
… the top 20 will advance to the November 15 finals live in Abu Dhabi.4
We’ll have more on the semis and finals, of course, but for now a couple notes on what to expect from the open qualifiers in August.
First, I’m not gonna lie, but I kind of hate the format. Here’s the course:
Image: UCI If you look closely, you can see there are five different points locations - two climb segments, two sprint segments, and the finish line. Each one awards a maximum of 40 points. When I first read this, I loved it - I’m a big fan of points races where the incentive to sprint/go all out at intermediate locations is high.
But then I realized that the intermediate locations award fastest through segment (“FTS”) rather than first across the line (“FAL”) points. In other words, crossing the line first at the end of the segment doesn’t really matter - having the fastest time across the segment does.
I’m not a FTS fan for two reasons. First, it’s difficult to follow for fans. When you are watching and the front of the peloton crosses the finish line of the segment, you don’t actually know who won. You have to wait until every rider has completed it, since riders out the back can still, in theory, take the points by getting through the segment faster than the leaders. Second, it just creates weird racing incentives. Sure, those finish line points are going to matter to qualify, and it’s tough to see how a rider could make it without scoring big there, but getting dropped isn’t a massive deal if you’ve got compatriots or teammates to collaborate with on each segment while resting in between.
07/23/2025 Edit: When I published this earlier today, I hadn’t realized that last week Matt Smithson, Director of Esports and Game Operations at MyWhoosh, went on the Virtual Velo podcast and said they might move back to FAL for the intermediate points segments in the open qualifiers. I’m not gonna lie - I listened to that episode when it was released, but had a screaming kid with me at the time and so must have just missed it. So that one is on me y’all!
However, as of the time of this edit, the official UCI Technical Guide still states that the open qualifier will use an FTS format for the first four segments. So it seems like that change hasn’t actually happened yet, just two weeks from the first race. I suppose we’ll see, but if they move back to FAL that obviously moots my critiques here and I’d have only positive things to say about the format.
That being said, the democratic nature of the open qualifiers - anyone can do it! even you! - is great. Zwift did a similar thing with ZWS this year (and by extension Zwift Games), and it’s a trend in virtual cycling that I love.
Last year, MyWhoosh and the UCI had a similar system. It’s a little hard to go back and piece together who qualified through the open system, but as far as I can tell there were 31 men and 29 women who qualified for the semi-finals through the public events.
Of those, only two on the men’s side - Kjell Power and Siebe Deweirdt - made it through to the finals in Abu Dhabi, finishing 13th and 20th, respectively. It’s not a coincidence that both riders represented Belgium, a country that had the maximum number of slots for the semis and has more elite riders than they know what to do with.5
For the women, only China’s Hao Zhang made it through, but for whatever reason didn’t end up competing in Abu Dhabi.
Some other notable cycling esports names that made it into the semis through the open qualifiers last year were Junsei Honda, J. Bruhn, Berk and Kaan Kayin, Dean Cunningham, Nile Battey, and Ewan Mackie on the men’s side; and Åsa Fast-Berglund, Ursulia Bardovskaja, Gokce Paul, Anna Svärdström, Dorancy González Rúa, and Roberta Bussone for the women.
It’s a notable list. If we’re being totally honest about it though, I don’t really expect any riders that qualify through the open races to actually challenge for a world championship. But the underdog stories are a ton of fun, and the public qualifiers are the sort of thing you go into hoping to find a diamond in the rough, to see a rider you’ve never heard of explode on to the scene and challenge some of the elite names in professional cycling esports. Sure, it’s unlikely to happen. But I’m excited to watch to see if it does.
And Tim Wellens’ butt. Chapeau on the stage win!
This analogy doesn’t apply to me though. I watch pretty much every Mets game lol.
I will note that if you actually look at the numbers here, they don’t *fully* make sense. The UCI qualification document states that “[a]pproximately 150 riders of each gender [will] qualify[ ] for the semi-final through National Federations based quota allocated by the UCI.” It also says that “30-50 riders [will] qualify[ ] through [the open qualifier system].” But then the description of the semi-finals says there will be “approximately 150 riders.”
Needless to say, those numbers don’t really add up. If we look at the quotas above, there are 126 spots for men and 135 for women. That’s 84% and 90% of a 150 rider field, which is obviously inconsistent with the UCI saying that approximately 70% of riders in the semi-finals will come through the national federation quotas.
However, the figure on the same page in that document shows ~130 riders per gender qualifying through national federation quotas and ~20 riders per gender qualifying through the open races. That makes the most sense to me, and seems to be how it will play out.
Along with, potentially, a few discretionary wild cards.
It’s also not clear to me whether these two technically qualified through the open races or the Belgian federation. They certainly raced in the open qualifiers and qualified through them, but Belgium only had nine riders in the semi-finals, inclusive of Power and Deweirdt, one short of the ten slots the country had been allocated.
The whole public Q stuff is confusing. I expect to be nominated by my federation, but this won't happen before the public Q's. So I am thinking this will be filled with the top riders, and what positions in the race will take those (5?) spots per race.