Who Was This Season's Most Valuable Avatar?
Blog #24
When we started Pro E Cycling, one of the quirkier things we came up with was a concept of giving out a “Most Valuable Avatar” award at the end of each season. The award criteria is entirely objective within the constraints of the Pro E Cycling (“PEC”) ranking system: the male and female riders that receive the most PEC points throughout the season win our version of the MVP/Vélo d'Or.
To be clear, this award is entirely made up and probably meaningless for the riders that win it. But it’s fun - here are the past winners:
The 2024-2025 season is mostly over - only four months of Sunday Race Club finals remain. So I figured it would be a good time to take a look at the race for MVA heading into those final races.
One programming note: I’ll be on vacation the next few weeks and taking a bit of time off from the blog. Lots of great stuff planned for when I’m back though!
Men
The story on the men’s side this year has been one of parity:
Neal Fryett, perhaps surprisingly, has rocketed to the number two spot in the standings primarily by winning the Zwift Games Overall Championship and two stages to boot.
The ever-consistent Lionel Vujasin has turned in what will likely be his second best season ever by our metrics, and Ollie Jones’ Zwift World Series GC win has capped off another great season for the OG legend in which he also bested Mathieu van der Poel in the Zwift Academy race.
Ruben Dhondt was the breakout star of the year, finishing on the Zwift Games podium and winning a Zwift World Series stage. I could go on.
Despite this, the MVA race is over: Jason Osborne will take home his first ever award. And what a year it was. The German rider became the first man ever to win multiple UCI cycling esports world championships, joining current FDJ - Suez World Tour rider Loes Adegeest as the second rider ever with two world championships. He also won the Zwift Games Epic Championship and, perhaps most importantly, five of the eight monthly SRC finals thus far. All told, Osborne has won 35 of the 101 SRC races he has entered in his career, and finished on the podium an additional 20 times. That’s an astonishing 54% podium rate - higher than any other rider with at least 100 entries other than Michael Vink and Michael Knudsen.
It’s also been great to watch Osborne return to this level of dominance in the virtual peloton. Osborne spent the past four seasons riding for Alpecin - Deceuninck, first as a development rider and then in the World Tour. He and Vink (who rode for UAE Team Emirates) returned to cycling esports full time this year, and it’s encouraging to see their investment in the sport paying off.1
Anyway, here are the current MVA standings:
Women
The story of the 2024-2025 season on the women’s side has started and ended with Kate McCarthy. So it’s no surprise that she’s locked up her first ever MVA.
I’ve written extensively about McCarthy’s season throughout the year. But each time I circle back to it, the palmares become more ridiculous. She’s reaching Pogi levels of “okay, this is making the sport a little boring” success. For instance:
Earlier this year, I celebrated Ollie Jones becoming only the fifth ever rider, male or female, to reach 1,000 career PEC points.2 McCarthy has topped 1,000 points just this season.
Her 1,003 PEC points this year are by far and away the most ever in a single season - 275.7 more than Kathrin Fuhrer’s incredible 2023-2024.3 And she can put even more distance between herself and Fuhrer in the final few SRC finals races.
McCarthy has won 10 pro races this year. That’s the Zwift Games Overall Championship, two stages, six SRC monthly finals, and… shoot. There was one more… Oh yeah, the freaking world championship.
The success has mostly come out of nowhere - she had a single pro win before the season started.
But just to put this in perspective: her 10 wins this season are more wins than every other female rider has in their career besides for Fuhrer, Lou Bates, and the legend that is Cecilia Hansen. It’s also more career wins than any man in the non-Osborne and Vink division.
And it’s not like she’s lost races - those 10 wins are in the 12 pro races she’s finished this year.4 The only times she’s lost? Second place in the January 2025 SRC finals, and second in the Zwift Games Epic Championship, where she was protecting her GC lead.
Remember how I was oogling Osborne’s 54% podium rate in all SRC races above? Yeah, McCarthy has a 60%… win rate. It’s only 43 races, but she’s won 26 of them.
So, yeah. I’ve sort of run out of adjectives/words to describe McCarthy’s season, and she’s well deserving of her first MVA. The only remaining question is whether it’s the best virtual season ever - but that’s a column for another day 😁
McCarthy and Gabriela Guerra have since joined the 1,000 point club as its sixth and seventh members.
It’s completely true that, as the sport has professionalized and the number of professional races has increased, the number of points available to the top riders in a given season has increased dramatically. I plan to write about this a bit more, but the sport is still incredibly young - this is just the seventh season. And the first two (prior to the first UCI World Championship and the first Zwift Premier Division) had barely any points on offer.
Keep up the good work with this site. It is nice to see a place where the key results of real riders can be viewed and compared. These ranking lists should be far more publicly known about vs the junk on sites like zwiftpower. Thanks, Josh Harris.