Pro Cyclists get Crushed at Zwift World Championships & Matt White Doubts Pogacart

A non-cyclists wins the Zwift World Champs & Matt White illustrates how strategic blindspots exist in pro cycling

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The UCI e-racing World Championships took place this week. Yes, there is a UCI sanctioned e-racing world championship, these are undoubtedly strange times. Some of the world’s best pro cyclists lined up with random amateur e-racers on the virtual riding platform Zwift to race for an hour on a course in the Watopia world (yes, these are actual words). I didn’t watch the entire race, but Zwift released a quick highlights package.

Pro cycling is unique in that top-level athletes can actually compete in their sport against random people via online platforms. Certainly, athletes from sports like soccer, football, and basketball can play their sport via a video game, but they aren’t literally replicating the movements or effort required in the real world. Considering this, you might think the pro riders like Michael Valgren, Edvald Boasson Hagen, Alberto Bettiol, Tom Pidcock, Rigoberto Urán, Victor Campenaerts, Thomas De Gendt, Esteban Chaves, Jack Haig, and Daryl Impey would have dominated the regular Joe’s logging on to race against them.

But, once the race started, a thing strange happened. The random amateurs logging on from their living rooms and garages proceeded to absolutely destroy some of the most talented cyclists in the world. And it wasn’t even close. In fact, the winner of this event, Germany’s Jason Osborne, isn’t even a competitive cyclist, but an Olympic-level rower. In fact, none of the big-name starters finished in the top ten, and the only two professional cyclists to finish in the top ten, Matteo Dal-Cin of Rally Cycling and Freddy Ovett, who was with Israel Start-Up in 2020 but appears to be without a team for 2021, were mostly unknown entities before this result.

Top-Ten Results

1) Jason Osborne (Germany)1:05:15
2)Anders Foldager (Denmark)0:00:02
3)Nicklas Pedersen (Denmark)
4)Ollie Jones (New Zealand)
5)Ben Hill (Australia)0:00:03
6)Lionel Vujasin (Belgium)
7)Matteo Dal-Cin (Canada)
8)Freddy Ovett (Australia)
9)Ryan Larson (USA)
10)Jonas Hvideberg (Norway)

Full Results Here

So what happened here and what should we take away from this? The tempting conclusion to draw is that pro cyclists are overrated and that random fit amateurs could win the Tour of Flanders and France if given the shot. While some of this element could potentially be true; there is an astonishing number of extremely talented cyclists in the general population who don’t race at the top level for a variety of reasons, the main reason we are seeing surprising results as we saw at the Zwift World Championships is that, outside of physically moving your legs in a pedal motion, e-racing doesn’t have that much common with real bike racing.

Below is a brief list of just a few of the major differences between the two racing forums:

• Professional cyclists don’t really care about e-racing. Big-name riders are currently in the meat of their offseasons and are as unfit as they will be all year. Additionally, this is the Super Bowl for amateur e-racers

• The length of e-races are much, much shorter than real racing (1 hour in e-racing versus 4-6 hours in real-world racing)

• E-racing is all about absurdly intense, short efforts. The sheer length and grind of top-level WorldTour racing dull riders’ top-end speed and ability to reach that top-end intensity.

• E-racing isn’t real road racing. The technical nuances (i.e turning your bike) and complex tactics of road racing are completely absent in e-racing, which is how a pure pedal-to-the-metal athlete, like a rower, could come in and kick the butt of world-class cyclists.

In summation, as much as the UCI and certain stakeholders want it to be so, e-racing is simply a different sport than road racing. And as Osborne so excellently illustrated this week, you don’t even have to be a real cyclist to excel. This is a major issue to those who wish for e-racing to be the next big thing and those who are doing well and thinking they could jump to the front of the line and contend at the 2021 Tour de France.

Strategic Blindspots in Pro Cycling

In last week’s newsletter, I discussed how the 2021 Tour de France odds were severely underrating Tadej Pogacar’s odds of repeating as Tour champion. Even with 58-kilometers of individual time trials spread across three stages and a lack of punchy summit finishes, it seems clear that Pogacar, as the best grand tour in the world, should be favored to repeat in 2021.

However, Matt, White, lead sport director at Mitchelton-Scott, said this week that the 2021 Tour route would likely keep Pogacar from defending his title. His logic was that a lack of punchy summit finishes would keep him from pulling out time at the end of stages and that riders like Primoz Roglic and Tom Dumoulin would put minutes into him in the time trials.

I would understand this point-of-view if this interview was given in May of 2020, but Pogacar showed in the 2020 Tour that he is capable of taking time on nearly any type of stage. His biggest gap in the mountains came on Stage 8, which featured a downhill finish, and he pulled out the biggest gap on his rivals and won the race in the Stage 20 time trial. While that TT finished with a steep 6km-long climb, he was actually the second-fastest rider in the first 40-minutes of that TT, only a second behind Dumoulin on flat-to-rolling terrain. The very same Dumoulin White said would put minutes into Pogacar into a flat-to-rolling TT.

It is baffling that many in the sport still don’t consider Pogacar to be a world-class time trialist and instead see him as a punchy rider who steals time on steep summit finishes. At this point, his record shows that when he is in shape, he can take time whenever and wherever he pleases.

White’s mischaracterization illustrates an extremely interesting part of pro cycling. An intelligent decision-maker in a major team is fundamentally misunderstanding the sport’s best grand tour racer. This shows how the opaque nature of performances, even from those inside the sport, can perpetuate major strategic blind spots and cause riders and teams to misread a race. If a team goes into the 2021 Tour with the thought that they can sit back and wait to put time into Pogacar into the time trials, they will find themselves shocked and digging out of a deep hole, even though this is exactly what happened to Jumbo-Visma in 2020. You would imagine that the “sit back and wait” strategy to beat Pogacar would be dead by now, but this zombie idea continues to wander through the minds of the sport’s decision-makers and could have major implications on racing strategy in the coming season.