I use zwift on a regular basis and I'm still trying to wrap my head around how much of a complete loser you would need to be to cheat on a virtual cycling app, whole thing's just mind blowing to me
I once got a vm from a stranger telling me there was some stuff I should know about an employee. I asked the employee and the stranger was using a fake name and was upset that the employee had figured out the stranger was lying on some ultra distance internet forum.
People would post times for "events" they did like "bike from Boulder to longs peak, run up the trail to 13k feet, climb the diamond to the summit then run down then bike home."
Stranger was posting fake results then using sock puppet accounts to verify ("I met him with climbing gear at the end of the run, amazing effort!") He got caught because he posted a result on a rarely run trail that the employee had run, out and back, at the same time and not seen anyone.
Forum was tiny, free to join, no prize money or sponsorship etc. Some people are just crazy.
People will cheat anything. I did a fun ride this weekend, a century around Denver, and caught some dude I passed earlier in the ride getting out of a car toward the finish with his bike. It was an un-timed event.
For Zwift, there are cash prizes for high end racing and even slots on pro teams on the line at times. Zwift also ran the UCI world championship for indoor cycling. So there's more pressure on some to cheat than you might expect.
I had the same reaction when I first encountered marathoninvestigation.com, which is a blog that calls out cheating in road running races. Most of these people cheating aren’t even anywhere close to the level where having a slight edge might allow them to place, or win prize money. So they’re effectively competing against themselves to set a personal best time…and cheating at it. So strange to me.
I’m reminded of the tagline from The King of Kong, the documentary about competitive Donkey Kong: “The competition is so vicious because the stakes are so low.”
I mean think about the lifetime midpack Cat 3s who get caught for doping every so often. Some people have that weird brainworm that makes them do this. I repeat this a lot but: powerlifting is one of the only sports that had a chance to be fair because there are tested and untested federations, and the untested federations had cash prizes before the tested ones did. With all of that being the case, I know of people who failed drug tests after coming in top 3—but not winning!—a local meet in NYC. Absolute loser behavior, and it only takes 1-2% of participants to do that to taint the whole game.
My thoughts exactly - I could just sit at home and write down in a log book every day that I beat my personal best and rode 1000 miles per week at a record pace, - some people really need to get a life.
