Is cycling esports all cheaters and weight-dopers? Yes, no, sometimes, it's not that simple. As the fledgling discipline fights to emerge from the negative stigma of distrust, evolution in technology, innovation, governance, performance verification, and advanced anti-cheating protocols lead the charge toward legitimacy and the push for positive perception.
You’d have every reason to ask these questions if you rocked up to a random community race on any virtual cycling platform lately – races where it's still very much the Wild West. Or if you read mainstream cycling media's sensationalism of elite esports cheating scandals, pandering to traditionalists thirsty for any reason to “mock that which they don't understand.”
Truth is, all of the elite cycling esports racers ever popped for e-doping could fit in the 1998 Tour de France Festina team car. The last identified case of intentional cheating in a sanctioned event was back in 2022.
Cracking down on community cheaters is bad business
A recent study investigating attitudes toward weight doping anonymously surveyed 638 competitive virtual cyclists. Despite widespread perceptions of cheating in online racing, the results told a different story – 87% of men and 91% of women reported accurately entering their height and weight. In contrast, only 4% admitted to deliberately altering their weight.
The other painful fact is that all virtual cycling platforms are financially disincentivized to crack down on community cheaters. Zwift racing has seen substantial growth since the company’s 2021 statement, which labeled the platform as not primarily focused on esports because the majority use the platform solely as a training tool. At that time, only around 20% of users were competitive.
Since then, Zwift has experienced a year-over-year increase of 10-20% in monthly competitive users, and a third of the user base competed in at least one race, which is a 50% increase from 2022 to 2023.
Researchers asked almost 1,500 members of the virtual cycling community about cheating for this study. A majority of those who responded, 44%, reported experiencing some form of cheating in online races (40% reported “no” and the rest wereundecided), and 51% said it left them feeling angry or annoyed.
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