UCI eSports World Championship

Racing
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Who watched the races? What did you think?
I really enjoyed both the men’s and women’s races - both kept it interesting basically to the line. I wrote a little something about the women’s race in case you’re curious about what some of the racers thought about it. Women’s UCI Esports Worlds Wrapup | Zwift Insider

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The results confirm my theory - if you want to be good cyclist, start with rowing.

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I caught bits of both (side watch during work) and enjoyed them both. Surprised by the final attack and break success too. Solid efforts by both to rip a win so decisively.

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Right!! Seriously thinking about adding rowing to my off season/ cross training :smiley:

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Yeah, those were massive moves by Ashleigh MP and Jason respectively!

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My only complaint is why do they never show the starts? They dropped into the womens’ race after 16km I think. At that point Vandebreggen was in the second group and it would have been interesting to see what happened and what caused the split.

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Rowing does not make a good cyclist, rowing makes an amazing e-cyclist :wink:

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Have you looked at some power numbers of ex-rowers? :slight_smile: I would say rowing does not make excellent climber but it makes cyclists with tremendous amount of power and ability to suffer. So basically I’m terms of pure numbers and mental toughness rowers are beasts.

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  1. The Canadian men don’t understand eRacing.

  2. Never heard of the winners, or even the podiums.

  3. Still chafes me that they award actual rainbow jerseys for this.

Entertaining enough for a Wednesday AM event, I guess…but they need to make the courses more challenging.

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I guess that’s not really 100% surprising since e-racing is a relatively new discipline.

I agree though that the course could have had a few more defining features.

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That was super unfortunate! the start of the race was great and the few initial climbs shattered the field so quickly.

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It certainly seemed like the IRL pros phoned it in on the men’s side. Understandable given it’s the off-season for them but doesn’t exactly make for an interesting race.

Thomas de Gendt averaged .75 IF :laughing:

They should have just excluded the WT pros and big names if they weren’t going to really try.

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He was ill

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Were you in it or did you watch it somewhere other than youtube?

It feels like all the big races I watched on the Zwift or Zwift Community Live channels on YouTube all drop in after the race starts. It would be like starting coverage of a UCI cyclocross race 20min into a 60min race. All kinds of crazy stuff has happened, including the start, and you miss it. And they’re talking for at least 5 minutes doing pre-show stuff before they drop in. That is happening at the same time as the race is going on, just show the race!

I need to stop day-drinking. It is making me too emotional. lol.

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When I saw it was going to be on Watopia Figure 8 my first thought was BOOOOORING! That is one of the oldest routes. I think they used it or something close for the various national champs last year.

There are plenty of more interesting routes or put a new one together for the event. One of the fondo routes that hits climbs of different lengths (forward / reverse KOM, volcano, entrance to jungle circuit, Epic KOM) would be interesting or something like 3 Sisters.

I’m not all complaints though, it was cool to see the women and men just destroy the forward KOM. Moolman-Pasio looked to be around 8wkg the whole way and I think the men’s winner was 9-10wkg. Bonkers.

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I wasn’t racing but I was watching my teammate in-game.

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I skimmed through most of it because it was so boring–really poor route choice IMO. They also really need to stop trying to make the broadcast like a real cycling event and embrace all the data they have available–like why don’t they show the grade (I saw them flash it up for like 5 seconds during the last stretch to the finish)? Or the speed? And they go for big chunks of time showing nothing but the distance and time. They tried a little with the new efficiency metric, but that wasn’t super useful or something the normal Zwift rider would see and compare against. I think if they had done something more similar to the last ZPro Tri race it would have been a lot more exciting to watch, especially to see what the pros would have put out in a TT at the end.

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I’m envious, that must have been super cool.

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My musings…

It must have taken a Herculean effort to get up the Fwd KOM in 1.21.4 after 50km of racing!

AMP was destined to win given the course. And fair play, she’s been a brilliant in the races this year.

The German’s made a great choice in Osborne. Obviously knew what they were doing.

Upset it wasn’t Vujasin that won. I wanted to see the rainbow bands in the community races. That won’t happen now.

eRacing is a proper disciple. We can’t deny it now.

Great to see everyone on the same trainer.

Talk of the draft being different. If it was, not a good move from Zwift.

It’ll be a different affair next year!!

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Ha, I had my money on Gigante for the win, but definitely a podium for AMP given her previous race results.