Mad Monday: The home of split category racing on Zwift...

TFCs origins are in some of the very earliest races on Zwift. This was before races even had start pens and we just sat on the road and started at the agreed time. Working out who had won was also a bit tricky! As Zwift evolved so did the racing scene and we finally got our start pens! One of the biggest weaknesses of it was a rider’s ability to select their own category and race well below their potential. It only takes one sandbagger to ruin a race and Zwift, frankly, was a sandbagger’s heaven.

Enter the fray ZwiftPower! Thanks to the determination of a few individuals to protect the integrity of our race experience a system of automated result reviews, 90 day power output tracking and rankings evolved. ZwiftPower became, and still is, the official results for Zwift races. Whilst a material step forwards from the days of the wild west the well documented and relatively simplistic nature of critical calculation involved still left gaps for the sandbaggers and cruisers to exploit.

In 2022 Zwift took the game forwards another step with the launch of the Category Enforcement (“CE”) regime. This, for the first time, blocked riders from entering races below their demonstrable capabilities. With access to the game itself it also captures far more data points than ZwiftPower ever could. Our racing capability is no longer defined by our best 3 efforts in the past 90 days but by a full power curve based on all our Zwift activity.

An important facet of CE is that no one outside of Zwift HQ knows exactly how its key parts are derived or used. The precise mechanics of how one’s zFTP and zMAP are estimated are deliberately kept under wraps. Likely to avoid the sandbaggers understanding and then gaming the situation as was possible with ZwiftPower’s 3 best 20 min effort approach.

Most of us would agree that CE has further helped eliminate poor behavior (pockets still exist…) and this is part of TFCs decision to fully embrace it in our Mad Monday race series.

It has, however, given race organizers some challenges. The strength of CE is that it’s not clear how it works. The disadvantage is that race organizers do not have a clear understanding of how it works! As such some of the rules that we have applied before (such as UPG and WKG) are no longer as enforceable in such an objective manner.

As such while embracing the CE framework we thus accept that the post race review and moderation of race results will need to evolve. We can no longer just apply hard “transparent” and “publicized” rules (e.g. +0.2 w/kg tolerance) because no one outside of Zwift has the required transparency of CE for us to operate in the same way.

Our commitment is thus as follows:

1. Mad Monday will embrace Zwift CE as it is a superior way of maintaining the integrity of races. The benefits of using it far out way any drawbacks around transparency.

2. We will continue to monitor race results in ZwiftPower and reserve the right to challenge / remove racers with abnormal power and HR signatures.

3. Were we feel compelled to take action to protect the integrity of our race we will do so and communicate with relevant riders / applicable captains. Such interventions will be a last resort and final.

For this series our applied Category Enforcement limits are as follows: