The UCI & MyWhoosh announced yesterday that the MyWhoosh virtual cycling platform has been selected for the UCI Cycling Esports World Championships in 2024/2025/2026. Up till now Zwift has been the platform utilized for the online cycling World Championship event, which has typically been held in the winter months (usually between December and February, this past year for 2023 it was held in February). Note that this Esports event is very different than the ‘Indoor Cycling’ event , as that event involves ‘artistic cycling’ – and has been held since 1956. In case you’ve never seen that, you need to stop what you’re doing and watch this immediately . Likewise, this is all different than the UCI Cycle-Ball World Championships , equally amazing.
The Esports variant has been held since 2020 (albeit skipping 2021) on Zwift, born mostly out of a blend of pandemic-era tailwinds, and Zwift’s desire at the time to try and get cycling Esports into the 2024 Olympics .
Now, many over the last 24 hours have said this seems like a ‘loss’ for Zwift, and in some ways that is probably true. But one has to remember, this is simply a paid bidding for this event. In the past, other platforms have evaluated it as well – and we’ve seen sponsorships there too. For example, both Garmin/Tacx and Wahoo have sponsored the event as well, on the hardware front (trainers). On the platform side, other platforms have looked at it as well, but my discussions over the […]
Continue reading the original article at: www.dcrainmaker.com