On one hand, elated that I managed to complete all seven stages. On the other hand, a little sad that the energy, the buzz, and, dare I say it, the excitement, are all over. For now, anyway.

But before I get all teary-eyed, I just want to say a big thanks to Matt Payne and Emma Martin for their live broadcasts and daily podcasts with Hayley Simmonds. I’d estimate Matt and Emma have been spending at least 10 hours a day, maybe more, prepping, writing, testing, organising guests, streaming, editing and breaking down every stage. And that’s before you account for Hayley competing and co-hosting the podcast as well. Well done to all of you ❤️.

If you haven’t subscribed to their YouTube channel or podcast, I have included the necessary details at the end of this post. Do yourself a favour: subscribe and tell them I sent you 😉.

The battle nobody else knew about

Of the 108 Cat 6 men who lined up for Stage 1, fifteen had pulled out by Stage 7, leaving 93 of us still standing. And of those 93, there was one rider I’d developed a “competition” with. Completely unintentional, entirely good-spirited, but a competition all the same. He knew about it, too.

Not Simon Llewellyn, who’d passed me convincingly on the leaderboard back in the middle stages. It was Bjorn, and we were fighting it out for 83rd in Category 6. Read that again if you need to. He came into Stage 7 sitting 2 minutes and 16 seconds ahead of me on GC. As Bjorn himself put it in the comments after an earlier stage, “coming in at 83rd or 84th overall shouldn’t feel important, but strangely enough, it does”. And he was right. The nerves were real. The strategy was real. How was I going to find over two minutes if we ended up in the same group? At what point would forcing a breakaway even make sense, late in the race, with the Bahrain Hills waiting to punish anyone who tried?

The race

I’d hoped the start of Stage 7 would be a more refined, orderly procession. Not on your life. The front went, and went hard. A minute in, I was dropped, no longer a surprise at this point. I clawed into the grupetto with familiar faces, Tim Sharp, Jan Gradys, Oscar H, but no Bjorn. Had he held the front group? Missed it entirely? Was he behind us?

Turned out he was behind, in the next group back, and our grupetto was opening a gap on him. When I say “gap,” don’t picture me sitting in, enjoying the view. I was suffering. Even this grupetto had teeth, and after 25 minutes of hanging on, I was dropped a second time. Nothing for it but to slide back toward Bjorn’s group, minutes behind by then. My grip on 83rd was slipping fast. That’s when fellow Aussie Steven Stolk and Sacha Ott came past, and I hooked onto their wheel, steadied the effort, and got back to something manageable. 83rd was back on the table, baby!

We picked up more shelled Cat 6 riders along the way: Tomi Lepisto, Oscar H again, Thor Kristian Skotte, and Tim Sharp, whom we caught napping on the way through. My lead over Bjorn ballooned back out to minutes, and I knew that if I could just hold this group through the Bahrain Hills, 83rd was mine MUAHAHAHA. The alternative, getting dropped with 10-15 km left and trying to solo it home with Bjorn’s group bearing down, wasn’t a situation I wanted any part of. Every time a higher category rolled through, someone in our group would attempt a breakaway off the temporary draft boost, and I’d curse them under my breath for making me work harder to stay attached. Fortunately, we, and by we I mean me, survived every one of those disruptions.

The sprint finish

Inside the last 10km, six of us were together, and you’d better believe that meant a sprint finish. I started bargaining with my legs about what they had left. The response wasn’t encouraging. 83rd was still on the line, and so was first from our sprint finish.

With just under 1.5km to go, a Cat 5 rider came through and disrupted the whole group. Oscar dug in to grab the wheel, which meant I had to dig in too, and so did everyone else. I wondered if this was the moment I got dropped. Punch, punch, punch again.

Inside the final 500m, the road bent right, straightened, and there it was: the finish, under 300m away. Now or never, legs be damned. I got into the drops and put out whatever was left in the tank, which by that point amounted to roughly two shakes of f*ck all, and drove for the line. I was so cooked I didn’t even register crossing it, still sprinting past the banner in confusion until the results appeared and I realised it was over.

Did I win our group’s sprint finish? No. Tomi and Tim beat me to it by less than a second. I did beat everyone else in our group, so some honour was salvaged.

Did I take 83rd overall from Bjorn? Yes, although it’s a subdued yes. A 2:16 deficit turned into a 12:02 lead by the finish. It was only after writing this post and checking the numbers that I realised I’d been just 18 seconds from claiming 82nd off Jan Gradys the entire time. That aside, there’s nothing quite like the fear and exhilaration of head-to-head racing in the closing kilometres, which is what I was quietly hoping for, but a good 83rd win is still a good 83rd win. Thanks again, Bjorn.

Who likes a good stat?

Beyond the obvious total distance (436km) and elevation (5,463m) numbers, a few things stood out across the seven stages:

• I dropped to 84.2kg by around Stage 4, down from 88.5kg at the start of Stage 1, and I was losing roughly 2kg each race. When I woke up this morning, I’m down three and a half overall.

• Total time on the bike across all seven stages, warm-ups excluded, was 16 hours, 59 minutes, and 33 seconds.

• Of the 46 riders registered as Category 6 Masters (the old guys), only 38 finished. I placed 34th.

• I burnt 11,393 kJ across the series, roughly the equivalent of 5.5 large Big Macs or 30 cans of Coke in calories.

• And the latest I finished any stage was Stage 5, at 1:02 am Melbourne time. It took me 3 hours and 42 minutes. I didn’t get to bed until 5 am later that morning.

What I learned, and whether I’d recommend it

MyWhoosh is no joke. But I never thought it was; having completed all seven stages across a genuine range of routes, I can honestly say I was woefully underprepared for the mental effort and physical endurance this demanded.

Drafting on MyWhoosh, initially so different, is something I’m growing accustomed to, and it’s started to feel closer to real-world riding than I expected. I’ve also learnt that the 2026 Championship probably wasn’t the gentlest event to kick off a MyWhoosh campaign with.

And I’ve learned that the MyWhoosh community is every bit as vibrant, understanding, and welcoming as any I’ve found on any platform, which made this whole experience far more memorable than the results alone would have you believe.

As for recommending this to others, that’s a more nuanced call.

If the goal is simply to push through and complete all seven stages, forgetting about the racing entirely, then yes. Absolutely. Just be prepared to endure what is, in my opinion, one of the most brutal virtual cycling series currently out there, where just finishing is the reward.

If the expectation is to actually race it, to be a legitimate front-group contender just within Category 6, you’ll need to comfortably hold 3.5 watts per kilo for an hour or more, with plenty above that on the bumps, pinches, and climbs.

Would I do this again? I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t already considering it, but only after the nightmares have stopped.

Now, what’s the SRC route this week?

Inside The Race (Website): www.insidetherace.com

Inside The Race (YouTube): www.youtube.com/@mywhooshracing

Inside The Race (Instagram): www.instagram.com/mywhooshracing

Hayley Simmonds (Instagram): www.instagram.com/hayleyrsimmonds

Emma Martin (Instagram): www.instagram.com/biking_emma

Matt Payne (Instagram): www.instagram.com/mattfixerpayne

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Frames were neutralised for everyone, the same rig across the board. Wheels were our own choice, and even though most people reckon it barely matters, I’ll take whatever mental edge I can get. ENVEs stayed on. Discs be gone.

Now “confidence” isn’t a word I’ll throw around quite as lightly again after this championship, but Sunday’s rest day had me feeling slightly more optimistic, even if my legs still felt like rubber and the stairs at home still required both handrails.

Stage 6’s parcours was the closest thing to my kind of course I’d seen all week (besides Stage 1), and I was coming in with one advantage: I’d been effectively time-trialling large chunks of every stage already. I knew exactly how this was going to hurt.

Did my new friend Bjorn chase me down in the second half of the race? Yes. Did I post my highest average power of all six stages, a whopping 208W? YOU’RE GODDAM RIGHT I DID!

Lap 1 took us straight into the first of three ascents up Camillien Houde, 1.63km at 5.9%, a real pinch, broken up by a short downhill that gave me just enough time to reset before going again. Michael Andersen and Tomi Leptiso matched me watt for watt the whole way up. Climb ticked off, and my focus shifted to the first sprint, the first of the series not decided by who crossed the line on the front.

FTS, hallowed be thy name.

My DS, Jessica Hamilton, called it perfectly: go full gas before the sprint zone starts, then hold it to the line. I ramped up and gave it everything.

Sixth

That’s where I crossed, briefly. It decayed to 8th once others had their turn (I’m lookin’ at you, Tim Sharp, and your 5ths), but as far as I’m concerned, I was 6th. Even Emma Martin sounded surprised to see a backmarker mixing it up. That meant I had to go again on lap 2, back to the fight with Michael, who’d used my recovery window to pass me. Tomi went with him, and that was the last I’d see of either. Still, I was sitting 75th, my best position of the series thus far, and I was going to defend it as best I could.

Deep into the second climb of lap 2, Bjorn Indal appeared behind me, chipping away second by second. The gap went down to 30, 20, 19, then back up to 23. That fight was coming, but it would have to wait because sprint two was approaching fast.

Jess flagged that my cadence had been too low the first time. I corrected, and as I crested the pinch into the sprint, Bjorn was now just 15 seconds back. Can’t I just have one easy lap?

I attacked in a slightly lower gear, veins bulging, shaving nearly 0.3 seconds off the effort. BOOM. I’ll take 7th in this field, on lap 2 any day of the week.

And that’s when Bjorn made his move, sensing I’d cooked myself a little too much. He shut the gap fast. By the end of lap 2 it was just 8 seconds, then he was past me, trying to pull clear. Not today, Bjorn, not today! While he freewheeled the downhills, I kept the power on, a gamble I wasn’t sure would pay off heading into the final lap, but I was going to find out.

Lap 3. I couldn’t shake him. It felt like he had me on an invisible rope; I’d lift the power, he’d lift his. Building for one last move. I wasn’t going to give him the chance. Near the top of the final climb, Bjorn passed me again, laying down 3.0w/kg. But where his strength was the climb, mine was holding the power on the flats and descents; his attack got shut down again.

Coming into the final sprint zone, we reeled in Javier Bertin, gaining another position. Bjorn had fallen 5 seconds back, but I knew that wouldn’t hold him off for long.

Now with under 2km to go, a gap that had ballooned to 16 seconds had disappeared again. Bjorn passed me and took 2 more. He wanted this as badly as I did, maybe more. Everything went red. I could have let him ride off and told myself a nice story about why that was fine. I didn’t. This wasn’t over.

1000m left.

Cadence up, power down. I passed him again inside the Flamme Rouge, sounding like a whale giving birth, through gritted teeth and pure adrenaline: 2.9 w/kg... 3.1 w/kg. If Bjorn wanted this position, he’d have to fight me for every metre of it.

Inside 400m, my gap was out to 5 seconds. Not safe, not with a possible sprint finish this close. I got out of the saddle for the last bump, eyes closed, heart hammering, watt bomb after watt bomb. The finish line seemed to be moving further away. “Keep going. Don’t sit down until you’re at the top,” I told myself. My legs had other significantly different opinions.

292... 298... still 400m out. I couldn’t see straight. Couldn’t read the time gaps; sweat was stinging my eyes. All I knew was Bjorn was right behind me, somewhere.

200m left, I had to sit down or I was going to fall down. And then, finally, the finish banner came into view. But where was Bjorn? Anyone who knows what it’s like to be snaked on the line by a chasing opponent knows it’s never over until it’s over. And so I left everything I had out there.

I crossed in 1:31:51, 21 seconds in front, and that was my best finish of the series. That final-lap battle pushed me hard enough that my lap 3 average came in 4 watts above lap 2.

This was redemption, not against Bjorn, who’s been a class act through all of this, but for my previous self, the one that was left shattered after stage 5. I wanted just one clean, honest effort to hang my hat on, and this was it. I paced it right, had something left to give at the end, attacked the sprints, and mixed it momentarily with the front group. I lifted when it would’ve been so easy to just roll over.

Tomorrow is stage 7. Whatever happens, thank you to everyone reading these moments from inside my head. The comments, feedback, shared experiences, and friends I have made have made this a really memorable experience. Genuinely unexpected, and greatly appreciated.

Time to finish this the way it started: with a smirk of determination and a glimmer of confidence.

The pens

It was 9:20 pm on a Saturday night in Melbourne, the temperature sitting around 10 degrees Celsius (or roughly 50 (F)reedom Units), and I remember thinking I would rather be anywhere else in the world right now. I was already dreading what was ahead.

My eyes flicked between the countdown in the pens and the A3 route profile printed in glorious colour, perched in front of me. This is the Colombia Mountain Route: 57.9km, 1,669m of elevation gain, three climbs, with a few flat kilometres scattered between these nightmares like false hope. And let’s not forget the side and headwinds thrown in to keep everyone honest. Averaged out, that’s 2.9% for 57km, with 43% of the time spent battling shitty wind of some description.

To whoever at MyWhoosh HQ decided this was a good idea for Stage 5, I have just one question: who hurt you?

Small mercies

There’s always something positive if you look hard enough, and in this case, it was Tim Sharp inviting me to join his Discord channel. Fantastic. Listening to the banter, the chat, the effort made the suffering slightly easier to carry. Bjorn was there, Scott too. Other names I recognised from previous stages, Rune, Tomi, drifted in and out. I’m sure there were more, but the voices started to sound the same after the first hour. I was silent for a lot of it. I could talk, or I could breathe. Rarely both.

Some might say Stage 5 was difficult enough on its own. But hearing that one of the guys was completing this stage on his wedding anniversary, which he had forgotten (and therefore purchased zero gifts for), reminded me there’s always someone who has it worse.

The first climb

The stage kicked off, and it actually felt like a race for about ninety seconds. Even the front recognised this would be a difficult day before I was gapped.

I averaged 10.6km/h and 200W for the first climb, just over 30 minutes, nothing I’ll be hanging on my wall anytime soon, especially knowing the bigger climbs were still ahead. I eventually caught up to Tomi as the Cat 5s caught up to us.

Through the flat section between climbs one and two, I reeled in Javier. Passing another Cat 6 back marker on a climb usually gives me mixed emotions, but I’ll admit I was secretly pleased to claw back a position wherever I could.

Paso Alto

The Paso Alto Climb started just before the clock ticked over one hour, and this one was going to take a while. Every subtle flat spot, even 40 or 50 metres of it, was anxiously awaited and gratefully received, even after I sacrificed a spot to Sacha Ott early on.

Tim Sharp was about three minutes up the road, so I fixated on the gap, watching it fluctuate. One moment it was 2:50; the next, it was 1:30 and then it was back to 2:40. My vision tunnelled, and when I wasn’t locked on the time gap, I was watching the names chase me. Bjorn is doing 2.5 watts per kilo while I’m grinding out 1.9. How is he doing that? I blocked it out and went back to Tim. Ohh, 54 seconds, awesome. Oh wait, it’s actually 1:18. WTF? And it went on like that for some time. Each swing encouraged me and made the day feel less manageable at the same time.

I eventually caught Tim at the top of Paso Alto, and with two climbs ticked off, I started to believe I could actually make it to the end of this stage. But you know what they say about the light at the end of the tunnel.

Climb three, and the cracks forming

Having someone to ride with always helps, especially into an 11km/h headwind. The chat got a bit more animated, and it was genuinely motivational to watch my speed climb above 15km/h for a change. Anything to stay ahead of Bjorn and Michael, only 50 seconds back by this point.

Just as the flat section between climbs two and three had lifted my average speed, it did exactly the same for Bjorn and Michael, who came sailing past at the start of climb three. That’s fine. I know who my friends are now.

We’d been at it for two hours and eighteen minutes, and with my speed, power, and heart rate all gradually dwindling, I knew the finish was still a long way off. That’s when the mental struggle started to make itself known. Really known. I knew I just had to keep turning the pedals and I’d eventually reach the end, but the combination of remaining distance and accumulated fatigue was doing everything it could to convince me otherwise. I kept pushing the thought out of my head as I kept trucking along with Tim. But with every turn of the pedals, every metre of elevation gained, the intrusive thoughts came back, and the doubt started to feel louder than the effort.

And then it happened

At 3 hours, 6 minutes, and 54 seconds, I did something I have never done in six years of virtual cycling.

I stopped. Only for about a minute, but it was enough.

It wasn’t the distance remaining, only 7.1 km at that point with half of it undulating. It wasn’t the gradient, even though we were sitting on a 9% segment at that exact moment. It wasn’t the four other stages already sitting in my legs. It wasn’t even the fact that it was 12:26 am. Honestly, I’m not sure what it was.

It’s easy to point at those things and call it an answer. Sure, this has been tough, double tough. But really, it’s nothing I haven’t done before, in some form or another, indoors or out. Whatever it actually was, mentally, I had cracked. I could have stopped the ride right there, recorded a DNF, and moved on, and no one would have cared. No spectacular headlines. No calls of commiseration. The world would have kept spinning regardless.

Instead, I sat up, I took a drink, reassured the others I was okay, waited about a minute, then took three attempts to clip back in before I started turning the legs again. I didn’t feel better. I just kept going.

The finish

Eventually, I reached the top, and with about 3.5km to go, I caught up to Tim again. We pushed to the line together, and yes, I did snake him on the finish, though something tells me he eased up, most likely out of sympathy, I suspect.

At just over3 hours and 40 minutes, Stage 5 was done. I’ll remember this one for a while, with a mix of accomplishment and disappointment. I guess whatever doesn’t kill you, right?. Anyway, the rest day can’t come soon enough.

Stage 6 is the TT, which people seem to have feelings about: the lack of a draft and how that will factor into their strategy. However, riding solo isn’t new to me, so it’ll be business as usual.

There are only two stages left. There is light at the end of the tunnel, and I genuinely don’t care whether it’s a train or not. Either way, I’ll finally be out of my misery, and that’s something I can look forward to.

The numbness

In my last post, I talked about the anxiousness and dread of lining up. That’s no longer the case, because you can’t feel anything when your legs are numb. I stare glassy-eyed as the countdown reaches zero, and only then am I flooded with panic, because now I actually have to turn the pedals.

Pain shoots through me like electricity, zapping my peripherals with a jolt of adrenaline as we push out. I’ll admit I was momentarily happy with the start of this one: a straight flat into a downhill. Naturally, the front of Category 6 took that as a personal challenge to drop the biggest watt bombs of the series. And like the night just before dawn, they were gone.

The real race

That’s fine, because the real race was never at the front. Sure, the heavy hitters were setting the pace, and why shouldn’t they? Qvickstrom, Rademacher, Ivanov, Montoya: quality racers, all of them. When you have that kind of engine, it isn’t just about completing the stage; there’s real strategy, tactics, and a specific pre-race structure involved, because the difference between them is often the finish, the placing, and the points on offer. Essentially, you can make choices. There’s a lot on the line for those few, and they’ve earned it.

But the real race, the unspoken one, the one that hides in a few live streams with 5 views, that aren’t broadcast with fancy graphics, was somewhere deep among the back markers, the second-half finishers. Using every ounce of experience and every scrap of motivation, not just to line up but to keep turning the pedals, not once, not twice, but three times up Dragon Fury. No fancy training plans, no coaches, no custom dietary requirements. Just Dads, sons, husbands, brothers-in-arms. Framed that way, the commitment takes on a whole different meaning.

Repaying Bjorn

On the first climb, I managed to repay some of my Stage 3 debt to Bjorn. We rode up Dragon Fury together with Oscar H, alternating turns and working to bag the first ascent. Even that early, my shoulders were hunched, and my head was dipping, never a good sign, but we made it to the top. I shouted encouragement to Bjorn, and although I knew he couldn’t hear me, I liked to think the positive vibes somehow translated through the app. Or that he’d at least catch it on the Twitch replay.

The Tim and Nathan show.

After that first ascent, I caught Tim Sharp, and it became the Tim and Nathan show for the rest of the race. We descended, ticked off lap 1, and suddenly there were only two laps left. Echoing the climb with Bjorn, Tim and I traded turns at the front as we headed back up. The climb was mercifully punctuated by a short, very short, flattish section about halfway, which I eyed hungrily every single time.

And that’s the real gold in events like this: the sense of camaraderie that emerges from shared suffering. We aren’t competing with each other, and we definitely aren’t enemies. (Simon is the exception, but you’ll need to read my Stage 2 recap to understand why. I joke, Simon. Mostly.) There’s something unique about these friendships, even the virtual, online kind, that form through suffering. An unspoken bond develops, and when I sit down and actually think about it, I think it comes from a place of honesty. There’s something to be said for experiencing something that pushes another person to a place where there’s no pretending, no excuses. You see the real person.

The finish

After the second and third descents, we found ourselves bearing down on the final few kilometres. The front had finished a while ago, the broadcast had packed up, the metaphorical lights had been turned off. Our race was still going, with our own places and finish still on the line.

With a kilometre left, I won’t lie: I was quietly thinking about putting the power down for one last kick. I knew there was nothing left in the tank, that I’d be calling on emergency reserves I didn’t actually have, but the would-be racer in me wanted something, even if it was just one more place at the tail end of a race everyone else had already gone home from. Turned out Tim wanted the same thing. We both kicked with 900m to go, and only one of us had the legs to keep the foot down. It wasn’t me.

The numbers

I crossed the line about 30 seconds behind Tim, who I suspect was quietly chuffed with that last effort (and if he wasn’t, he should have been). Congrats, sir. I finished 83rd, my best placing of the series so far, and I’m very proud of it.

Stage 5 brings 57km and 1,669m of elevation. I’ll wait for the numbness to return before I decide whether to line up. But something in me has already decided. I just need to accept it, and at some point, understand it.

At 66.6km and “only” 442m of elevation, you’d be forgiven for thinking this couldn’t possibly be harder than the California Hilly Route. You’d be wrong.

Like Stage 2, I sat in the start pens with my usual cocktail of anxiety and dread, my personal barometer for what counts as “hard” in this series having been reset completely, yet again. Sure enough, there was a bump less than a kilometre into the race, and my fatigued legs did what fatigued legs do; I was instantly dropped.

I soon found my people: the second-half finishers, the battlers... the unsung heroes. I settled in as best I could and tried not to think about what was still ahead.

What was ahead

What was ahead, you ask? Not one but two trips up the Hudayriyat Climb, 5.6km at 2.4%, adding 134m to the ledger each time, none of it gratefully received.

Over the 10km run-in to the climb, I shared the workload with Gareth Skw, Oscar H and Bjorn Roar Indal, names I was becoming increasingly familiar with as these stages wore on. This was also the first stage, and really my first time on MyWhoosh full stop, where I actually felt wind, proper headwind, the kind this course’s long flat sections seem built to deliver. Our little group breathed in and out like something alive: three riders, then five, then seven, back to four, back to seven again, right up until we hit the climb.

kgself, in the chat, informed me that the climb contained nine distinct steps and hairpins, with the gradient kicking up and then flattening off. Put that way, it sounded almost manageable. Almost.

The climb, and the man who saved my stage

My aim was clear: stay with the small group for as long as humanly possible. Remarkably, I actually managed that for the first 1.5km, before three of the group rode clear, stranding me in the middle with a couple of riders trailing behind, including Pawel Twardy and my soon-to-be best mate, though I didn’t know it yet, Bjorn.

Pawel eased past me around halfway up, right as the Cat 6 leaders started flying the other way on their descent. I pressed on regardless, reaching the 16.6km mark and the final kick to the top, then the U-turn, then the quick way back down.

Jessica Hamilton, who’s been in my chat the entire series, feeding me tips, intel and general encouragement, was cheering me on as I hit the bottom. And this is where Bjorn came to the rescue.

I was struggling. No point pretending otherwise. Bjorn slowly reeled me in, catching me around the 26.5km mark, and then did something genuinely kind: he eased off, sat on the front, and towed me for the best part of the next 8 kilometres, handing me whatever scraps of draft he had against a 12-13km/h headwind on the flats. It helped more than I can really explain. Thanks, Bjorn. I owe you one, and I hope I get the chance to pay it back.

Back on my own

After that, it was back to a solo time-trial effort, with the second ascent of the climb looming somewhere in my near future. My goal was to hold 90th or better, and when Oscar H came past me, I’d more or less resigned myself to another disappointment, right up until I passed Franklyn Vergara, who I suspect was dealing with some kind of mechanical issue. 90th spot was back on the table!

I’d love to tell you I found a second wind and the second climb felt easier than the first. That would be a lie. If the first ascent took 15 minutes, the second was even slower, but I made it to the top and back down again. No man, including myself, was left behind.

Cat 5s, Cat 4s, Cat 3s (you get the idea) streamed past me both up and down that climb, a steady reminder of exactly where I sit in this platform’s food chain.

Back on the flat, I passed Tommy Watts, somewhat to my own surprise, picking up another place I hadn’t expected. Tommy messaged me afterwards to explain he’d had technical issues of his own and limped to the finish somewhere between 30 and 90 watts. Ouch. Genuinely, ouch.

Eventually, I crossed the line. Another stage done.

Oh, and where was Simon, you might be wondering? He was well clear of me for this entire Stage, finishing minutes ahead. I’m still in 85th place, and Simon has edged closer in 87th. Well done mate, but neither you nor I are off the hook yet!

The question I didn’t expect to be asking

Everyone keeps saying the stages only get harder from here, and for the first time in this campaign, I found myself genuinely wondering whether I can see this thing through to the end.

That’s not a sentence I write lightly, and it’s not really like me. I’ve ridden 250km, 5,000m Audax events in the Australian heat. I recently finished FRR’s own Triquetra series, 21 stages in 23 days. Just the other week, I climbed for 12 hours straight, 5,000 vertical metres (through the night), for charity. Against that record, I’m standing in front of the mirror asking myself whether I can line up for Stage 4, let alone finish all seven. That’s confronting. It’s forcing some genuinely uncomfortable questions.

And I’m not acting overly dramatic about it. Well, maybe a little. Stage 4 is 68.3km with 1,110m of elevation across three climbs this time. When I say three climbs, I mean one climb we do three times, because why not. For those that know it, it’s the Dragon Fury Climb, an apt name I’m sure, same rough distance as the stage 2 climbs, but considerably more difficulty with a 4.3% average gradient. The question tonight isn’t the course.

It’s getting back on the bike at all.

Twitch Live Stream

You’d be forgiven for reading the name “California Hilly Route” and picturing something gentle. A meander. A pleasant undulation through wine country. That is not what this was. In reality, it was a soul-destroying 320m ascent into the depths of hell, the gradient flashing red in my head, if not literally on my screen, as it routinely touched 10%. One could be forgiven for seeing that number and turning around immediately, leaving this whole madness behind. I did not. I continued on. This will be a running theme.

The climb

Thirty-three minutes later, I made it to the top of the Country Climb, but not before donating several places to riders who were, let’s be honest, simply more capable and more courageous than me. Tomi Lepisto and I traded blows for the 84th spot for several kilometres before the road tipped up; I did briefly pass Simon Llewellyn at the 36.8km mark, which felt like a real achievement right up until he took the spot back a few hundred metres later. Then Michael Banke Andersen sailed through, followed shortly by his teammate Bjorn. That’s three places gone inside the first kilometre of climbing, with over 5km still left, and every one of them hurt the overall result. Christian Tovar was next to go by, though not before an entire wave of Cat 4s came screaming past me, which did wonders for my confidence and rather less for my ego, since for a moment I was fairly convinced I’d started pedalling backwards. Robert Cronje and Pawel Twardy claimed two more scalps as we hit the 40km mark.

I managed to cap the bleeding at seven lost places, mostly by keeping a nervous eye on Oscar H, Gareth Skwarczek and Tim Sharp, all three of whom were breathing down my neck as the final ramp to the summit kicked up to 12%. And yes, I haven’t forgotten Simon. He will become relevant later. This so-called “Country Climb” felt like false advertising on a criminal scale.

The descent, and the return of Simon

I finally crested the top and allowed myself the small mercy of free-wheeling down, scraping together whatever strength, energy and dignity I could find lying around. I think I lost an eyeball on the way up, because I was having a hard time seeing straight. Eight kilometres to go, surely the worst was over?.

Or was it?

Simon, by the summit, had opened up a lead of 3.5 minutes on me. So imagine my surprise on discovering that lead had quietly decayed to just under a minute, not that I’d noticed at the time. I was simply grateful to not be turning the pedals quite so hard anymore, while also knowing the gap was suddenly small enough to make the finish matter.

The descent was over far too quickly, and within minutes I was at the bottom, and so, infuriatingly, was Simon. That 55-second gap was now down to 10, which meant the next move could decide whether I recovered a place or lost the chance altogether. Two kilometres left. Could I claw back one place? I decided to find out.

As the road flattened, I put the power down, painfully dragging my watts past the 200 mark. I caught him with 1.6km to go, and rather than sitting up, I kept the power on and rode straight past, hoping he wouldn’t try to latch onto my wheel.

Of course, that is exactly what he bloody well did. Sat right in my draft, as if he’d known all along I was already at my limit.

The tunnel, the standoff, and the finish

By the time we hit the rainbow tunnel, Simon was glued to my back wheel, and a change of plan was very much required. I was not going to sit on the front and hand him a free lead-out to the line. With 1km to go, I eased off and let him drift past to the front. Game on, a proper game of cat and mouse, with the place now hanging on this next move.

By 600m, he was still leading, and I was quietly working out when to launch my sprint. Sprint. A generous word for what was about to be little more than a sustained, slightly desperate effort.

At 300m the road kicked left, and the finish line came into view. Go now, or hold a beat longer? The sprinter in me (or what was left of him) said go, so as the road straightened I got out of the saddle and put everything I had into the pedals.

I would love to tell you I demolished Simon with a blinding turn of speed. I would love to tell you that after 53km of racing he simply had no answer as I stormed across the line. I would love to tell you anything of these things.

Heartbreakingly, none of it was true. I did kick first, and I will proudly report I drove an anaemic 500-odd watts into the pedals for my trouble. That was, unfortunately, the full extent of my heroics, because Simon then unleashed a 12 w/kg beast of a sprint and gave me an unambiguous lesson in how it’s actually done. Fair play, Simon. Genuinely well played.

The numbers

So that was Stage 2. I came into the climb sitting 84th and finished the stage 90th, which made the losses feel very real. Climbing, I think we can safely say, is not my strong suit. Though racing on MyWhoosh has made it increasingly clear that I don’t really have a strong suit at all (thanks for that clarity, Simon) beyond a fairly unwavering determination to simply finish this series, whatever it costs me.

Will I be lining up for Stage 3 tonight? Yes. Do I now have a new mortal enemy? Also yes 😉. We’ve got two climbs to deal with this time, and combined they still have less elevation than that one country climb managed on its own, which doesn't make me feel any better about it.

Wish me luck. Or better legs. I’ll take anything I can get.

I’m not new to this. Four years of Zwift racing: 350 race finishes in that time and 88 podiums. I know what a race takes, how to position, how to pick my moments and what it takes to win. But none of that mattered last night. MyWhoosh, it turns out, hits different, and the real question I found myself asking was “Is MyWhoosh harder than Zwift?”

The plan that lasted five minutes

Stage 1 was 70km with 424m of elevation in Switerzland, not a monster on paper per se, but shaped to reward early commitment. Four intermediate sprints were on the table, and I’d mapped my race around them. My theory was simple: hold the front group to the first descent at 10km, survive the first real test, the Zurich Climb (a short 1.4km ramp at around 3.5% starting at the 12km mark) and I’d be in position to contest at least one or two of those sprint points.

It was a reasonable plan, and I assumed I’d get the chance to execute it.

I never reached the Zurich Climb with the front. Two kilometres in, on a bump so minor it didn’t even carry a category, I was off the back. Not dropped on the big test, dropped before I had even reached the test, on terrain I hadn’t flagged as a threat at all.

Why the small stuff is the real story

This is the part I keep coming back to. I’d done my homework on the climb that was supposed to decide the race. I’d done none on the uncategorised rise that actually did (not that it would have made much difference in the end anyway). And I think that’s the honest lesson of a first MyWhoosh race for anyone coming from Zwift with a pile of race experience behind them: your route sense doesn’t transfer. You can read a Zwift profile like a book after a few hundred races; you know where the moves go, what the platform is like and where the climbs tend to bite, but the pace, the speed and the effort of those on the front in Category 6 was at a level that, I’ll admit, I’m simply not used to.

Whether that’s a genuine difference in how MyWhoosh’s platform and pack dynamics behave under power, or simply the gap between a course I know intimately and one I’d never turned a pedal on, I honestly don’t know. But what I do know is that one race isn’t a sample size; it’s an anecdote, a useful anecdote nonetheless, because it’s forcing me to ask the question rather than assume the answer. The lesson is still provisional: can I be competitive on MyWhoosh as a Zwift racer, or do I need 350 race finishes under my belt on this platform before I can confidently stand toe to toe? I hope not, but I suspect so.

The long, lonely unravelling

What followed was the part every racer knows, and nobody enjoys talking about. I found a group, sat in, got dropped. Found another, sat in, got dropped again. Each pocket of riders I latched onto held for a little less time than the last, which is its own kind of sadness. I wasn’t just unlucky once; I was consistently on the wrong side of the numbers for the rest of the stage.

The moment that summed the race up best came when the Cat 5 bunch came through. There’s a particular flavour of hope that shows up when a bigger, faster group rolls through whilst mid-implosion. The fantasy is that you can grab the wheel, shelter, and claw back position by proxy. I chased that fantasy for a kilometre, maybe two, before it ended exactly how these things usually end. Off the back again. Alone again. Just me and another 350m of elevation, with none of the pack-assisted pace I’d started the race counting on.

What 85th actually tells me

I’m not writing this to complain about a result. 85th out of 108 in a field I’d never raced against, on a platform I’d never raced on, isn’t a disaster; it’s an honest appraisal of where I am when it comes to racing on MyWhoosh. What it tells me is that MyWhoosh racing rewards a kind of course-specific sharpness that you take for granted after years of racing on Zwift, and that I’m starting from zero on that front, regardless of what my Zwift results suggest that my legs or my racecraft are capable of. The lesson is not about the placing itself; it’s about what this platform seems to demand from the rider. The result matters less than the lesson: I need MyWhoosh-specific sharpness, not just form and a plucky attitude.

So did I pick one of the hardest possible races to kick off a MyWhoosh journey? Probably. A championship-format stage race against a field I know nothing about, on climbs I’ve never seen, isn’t exactly a gentle introduction. But six more stages remain, and now I’ve got something I didn’t have twelve hours ago: an actual read on where I am and what’s in front of me. That’s worth more than an easy top-20 on a stage I’d raced a thousand times before. The lesson for me is simple: start with the data, then build the result.

The changing numbers

After the race finished, things took an unexpected turn. Post-race, MyWhoosh bumped my FTP from 237 to 244. Fine, that’s a normal outcome of a hard effort. What’s not normal is that 237 was MyWhoosh’s number for me in the first place. My most recent Zwift FTP test (less than a month before) has me sitting at 258. That’s a 21-watt gap between what one platform thinks I can hold and what the other says I can do, before I’d even turned a pedal in anger. Is that the difference between the two?

And then Strava threw its own observation into the mix: my highest 30-minute effort of 2026, 245 watts, set during a race where I spent a good chunk riding alone off the back of every group I found, in an event I objectively didn’t perform well in, position-wise or performance-wise. But like anyone else who feels like they are drowning, I’ll cling desperately to anything I can, and these two results are just enough to encourage me to get off the floor and line up for the next race.

Stage 2 is tonight. Time to reset, take what I have learnt and go again.

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If you don’t follow the sport closely enough to have Uno-X Mobility on your radar, that’s fine. Nobody expected to be writing his name in a Tour de France GC story this morning either. That’s exactly what makes it worth telling.

How a breakaway became the whole story

Stage 4 had been highlighted as a day for the escape. 182km from Carcassonne to Foix, hot enough to make the peloton think twice about chasing anything without reason, with two classified climbs late on to soften up whoever did attempt it. Right on cue, a 34-rider group went clear early and neither UAE Team Emirates-XRG nor Vingegaard’s Visma squad saw a reason to burn matches reeling it in. Nobody in the break carried a GC threat worth the effort. Except for the two men who did. Sean Quinn and Torstein Træen, both sitting inside five and a half minutes of the lead, both aware that if the gap grew large enough, yellow stopped being theoretical.

The gap grew to nearly thirteen minutes. Mads Pedersen won the stage in a Lidl-Trek masterclass, his first win in three years, with teammates Vacek and Simmons shutting down every counterattack in the finale to deliver him cleanly. But the stage winner wasn’t the story by the time the GC sheet was finalised. Træen crossed in eighth within the lead group, which was more than enough. Pogačar came home with the bunch nearly thirteen minutes back and dropped from first to fourth overall. A rider nobody had even thought about three hours earlier woke up as the leader of the Tour de France.

Who is Torstein Træen?

This isn’t a complete unknown pulling off a fluke. Træen has previously worn the leader’s jersey at the Vuelta a España, four days in red last year, so he knows what it is to carry a Grand Tour lead. But yellow at the Tour is a different order of magnitude, and it arrives after a genuinely tough few years: Træen has battled cancer, which makes Uno-X team manager Thor Hushovd’s reaction at the finish hit rather differently. Hushovd, himself a Tour green jersey winner and world champion in his own riding days, called it the proudest moment for a team that started from scratch in 2017, and admitted through visible emotion that this wasn’t remotely what they set out to do that morning.

Træen’s own words afterwards were as honest as an athlete gets in the moment: “To be honest, I can’t believe it. I see the faces of my old coach, the soigneurs, everybody, how special it is. I don’t really understand what’s going on at the moment; in a couple of days, it will sink in”. That’s not a rehearsed script. That’s a man who lined up that morning like everyone else and finished wearing the most famous jersey in the sport.

Why the favourites let it happen

Here’s the part worth understanding if you’re new to how these things work: this wasn’t a mistake by Pogačar or Vingegaard’s teams. Conceding the jersey to a break on a stage like this is a calculated, entirely normal piece of Tour strategy. Neither Træen nor Quinn represented a threat over three weeks. The real GC picture didn’t change by a single second between the genuine contenders. What UAE and Visma effectively decided was that defending yellow through a 40-degree stage, purely for the sake of wearing it for one more day, wasn’t worth the collective effort. Pogačar himself said afterwards he expects Træen to hold the jersey for some time yet, given the size of the gap now standing between them.

There’s also a neat X-factor buried in the day: riders in the break get to set their own rhythm rather than grinding in the suffocating heat of a controlled bunch, which several riders and commentators noted made getting into the escape a genuinely smart way to survive the hottest stage of the race so far. Træen didn’t just get lucky with the pace. He got lucky with the tactics too, and made the most of both.

What happens next

Realistically? Nobody expects Træen to be standing on the Champs-Élysées in yellow on July 26. A 7:53 gap back to the genuine GC riders in fourth is a canyon, not a crack, and the Alps haven’t even started yet. Pogačar and Vingegaard will get their jersey back the moment the road tilts up seriously enough to matter.

But none of that makes today smaller. For at least one stage, probably a few, with Wednesday’s flat run to Pau unlikely to trouble him, cycling’s biggest race is being led by a rider who wasn’t on anyone’s list this morning, riding for a team that didn’t exist a decade ago, wearing a jersey most of us will remember for the story behind the man tather than for how long he kept it.

That’s the Tour de France at its best. The GC battle at the front is a three-week marathon chess match between two of the greatest riders alive. But some mornings, for no reason anyone could have picked in advance, the race hands the whole show to somebody else entirely, and today, it was Torstein.

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He didn’t. The panic button everyone’s reaching for isn’t wired to anything.

What actually happened on stage 3

The finish at Les Angles was a 1.7km climb at 6.5%, and calling it a climb is generous. It’s the kind of uphill drag that any decent club rider could hold a big-ring gear on. This wasn’t a mountain test. It was a power sprint with a gradient, at the end of a long, hot 196km day through the Pyrenean foothills.

And a power sprint with a gradient is just about the single most Pogačar-shaped finish that exists in professional cycling. Add a full UAE leadout with five riders controlling the front, then stage 2 winner Isaac del Toro dragging the group at full gas until 300 metres out and you’ve built a laboratory-perfect scenario for the world champion’s kick.

Vingegaard’s response to that scenario? He followed the wheel, held on through the acceleration, and conceded just two seconds at the line. Two. On the kind of finish that most exposes his one known weakness against Pogačar.

Then the bonus seconds washed out, and the GC reads: Pogačar 8:46:55, Vingegaard 8:46:55. Level. The jersey moved on a countback of stage placings - a tiebreaker rule, not a time gap. Vingegaard is exactly as close to winning this Tour as the man wearing yellow.

The pattern everyone’s forgetting

Here’s some history worth remembering before declaring any trend: Vingegaard losing small amounts of time to Pogačar in the punchy first week is not new. It’s the standard shape of every Tour these two have contested, including both of the ones Vingegaard won.

Vingegaard has never beaten Pogačar in a finish-line kick, and he’s never needed to. His Tours are won in the third week, at altitude, with sustained 20 to 30-minute efforts where Pogačar’s explosiveness ceases to be an advantage, and the pure aerobic engine takes over. Vingegaard’s campaign-level time on the clock after the first summit finish, having given up nothing but a sprint, is running exactly to script.

If anything, the position is better than the script. Visma won the team time trial. Vingegaard has worn yellow. His team put Sepp Kuss and Matteo Jorgenson on the front in the finale and looked organised. There is no crack to point at, no jour sans, no mechanical, no crash, no missed split. The worst anyone can honestly say is that he got outsprinted by the best puncheur-climber who has ever lived, on a puncheur’s finish.

The one thing worth keeping an eye on

However, honesty requires a caveat. Vingegaard looked less explosive than Pogačar in Stage 3’s finale, and it’s the second time in three days he’s come off worse in a direct kick. If that’s just Vingegaard being Vingegaard, fine; it’s priced in. If it’s a sign his top-end is further off than we expect, it narrows his path: he’d need every decisive moment of this Tour to be long and brutal rather than short and sharp, because in any close-quarters finish, Pogačar takes the seconds and the bonuses every single time.

That’s a real strategic problem. But it’s a problem for the later stages, not a verdict on stage 3.

The bottom line

The Tour de France has never once been decided on a category 3 drag in the first week, and it wasn’t on Monday either. Vingegaard is level on time with the defending champion, his team is functioning, and the terrain that decides this race, the terrain where he’s beaten Pogačar twice before, hasn’t appeared yet.

Losing a jersey on a countback isn’t a crisis. It’s barely news. Ask again after the first real mountain.

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It’s an inspirational story. It’s also an odd one once you consider what it means that the best cyclist alive can afford to hand away a Tour de France stage like a doorman holding a lift.

This isn’t generosity. It’s a hierarchy statement.

Cycling is a team sport wearing the clothing of an individual sport, and the pecking order inside a squad usually stays diplomatically unspoken; you find out who the leader really is by watching who does the suffering in service of whom, not by a press release. Pogačar just skipped the subtlety entirely. By gifting the win rather than contesting it, he made the hierarchy plain: his position atop UAE Team Emirates-XRG is so secure it can afford charity, and Del Toro, a rider being groomed as the team’s long-term GC heir apparent, received an unmistakable signal of trust and status within the group.

That’s not nothing. In a sport where hierarchy is everything, gestures are read the way court appointments used to be read in royal households. Pogačar didn’t just give Del Toro a stage win. He said, in public, exactly where Del Toro sits in his plans.

The competitive question this raises

Which brings us to the uncomfortable follow-up: if Pogačar can give away a stage win in the first week, what does that say about the rest of this Tour?

There’s a version of this where it’s simply good sportsmanship and smart squad management: Pogačar has four Tours in the bank already and nothing left to prove in a Barcelona bunch gallop, so why not let a hungry 22-year-old teammate have his moment early, build morale, and bank loyalty for the mountains still to come? Teams do this. It costs Pogačar nothing measurable and buys the UAE a stronger, happier Del Toro for the next three weeks.

But there’s a less comfortable version, too, and it’s the one Vingegaard’s camp will quietly be turning over. A rider who can afford to give away a stage in week one, against a start list that includes a two-time Tour winner and the reigning Giro champion, is a rider who isn’t remotely worried about his own overall position. It’s the kind of confidence that borders on provocation, the sporting equivalent of taking your foot off the gas to wave at the cameras. If the Tour is really that hotly contested, you don’t slow down to hand out gifts.

Del Toro’s tightrope

Spare a thought, too, for the man who actually won. Isaac del Toro now has a Tour de France stage to his name before he’s even turned 23, delivered as a gift from the most dominant rider of his generation, and every conversation about it, this one included, is going to spend more time discussing Pogačar’s decision than Del Toro’s legs. That’s the reality of being the chosen heir on a super-team: even your biggest days risk becoming footnotes to somebody else’s story. What Del Toro does with the platform from here, whether he pushes for genuine leadership down the line or settles into being the league’s most gifted lieutenant, may become one of the more interesting subplots of this entire Tour.

My honest take

Is this good for the sport? Mixed, honestly. It’s a wonderful moment for Del Toro, for Mexican cycling, and for anyone who likes seeing generosity rewarded on the sport’s biggest stage. But it’s also a very public indication that Pogačar may think he is already in control of this Tour, only two stages in, with nineteen still to go. If he is comfortable enough to be handing out presents in the first week, the rest of the field has a considerably bigger problem than a missed stage win.

We’ll find out in the mountains whether Sunday’s gesture was well-timed generosity from a man with nothing to fear, or possibly a miscalculation the four-time Tour winner may look back on with regret.

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You either stood on the side of a road for half a day to see the race flash past in thirty seconds, or you watched it on television and pretended your couch was a magic corporate box following the peloton. Either way, the race happened somewhere else. You were simply a spectator. Maybe a very invested one. Maybe one yelling at the screen as if Tadej Pogačar could hear you from a lounge room in the suburbs. But still, a spectator.

The line got crossed this year

That’s no longer true, and I don’t think the sport has clocked what it really means. This July, for the first time, you can ride the stage that morning and watch it in real time a few hours later. In other words, it’s not a nearby road, but the same one.

If you have been paying attention, you’ll know that this has been creeping up on us for a while. Virtual platforms have flirted with the Tour in one way or another for years. Zwift ran a cut-down version a few years back, when a digital version was the only option anyone had. Now, 2026 is the year the pieces actually click into one continuous experience, rather than a gimmick bolted onto the broadcast.

Take the most literal example. On June 26, Zwift switched on its expanded Paris map, crowned by the cobbled climb to the Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre, the exact climb that decides the final stage on 26th of July. So here’s the sequence that’s now possible: watch the pros hit those cobbles on the last Sunday of the Tour, then ride the same corners, the same gradient, the same run to the line, in your spare room that same day. Compare notes afterwards. The gap between watching and doing has shrunk to about the length of your hallway.

Zwift’s built a whole season around it. The Tour Fever Challenge runs July 2 to August 16. Five stages of rides and races across the new Paris roads, timed to shadow both the men’s race and the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. Before that, the L’Étape Challenge spent June serving up four of the climbs from this year’s Queen Stage, in the order the pros meet them.

However, before anyone gives Zwift too much credit, it’s worth being honest about the scale of what’s actually on offer. The Montmartre cobbles are the only genuinely new stage climb Zwift has bothered to replicate, on top of the long-standing Alpe du Zwift, which is a turn-by-turn GPS model of Alpe d’Huez’s front side (the back side, apparently, can wait). Sure, plenty of this year’s Tour climbs sit somewhere in Zwift’s climbing portal. But the flat, slightly sterile presentation barely lifts those routes above a data-driven training file, something you could just as easily load into any workout app. It’s not really the same thing, and it shouldn’t be sold as such.

Rouvy comes at it from the other direction, and in many ways more powerfully. Because Rouvy is real filmed roads rather than a rendered world, riding a Tour climb on Rouvy isn’t a tribute; it’s the actual tarmac, the actual hairpins, filmed on the actual mountains. That makes the platform’s route previews from the 2026 course, and its challenges built on real segments from this year’s stages, feel even more immediate. “I rode today’s stage” ceases to be a figure of speech.

Why this is bigger than we think

It would be easy to file all this under “brand activation” and move on. But that misses the point, and here’s why.

There aren’t many sports that can do this. You cannot play the World Cup’s latest match after it’s finished. You can’t bat an over at the MCG during the Boxing Day Test. But cycling’s playing field is public roads and reproducible physics: power, gradient, drag, which means the sport’s arena can be copied and handed to anyone with a trainer. Cycling has spent a century envying stadium sports their broadcast money. It turns out cycling owns something better: an arena that duplicates.

It changes the feeling in a way that is difficult to describe. When you’ve ridden Montmartre’s cobbles yourself, even virtually and even with a quarter of the watts, you don’t watch the pros climb it the same way. You know where it kicks. You know the corners where your legs screamed at you to stop. Every armchair fan becomes a fan with skin in the game, and that’s the deepest hook any sport can get. It’s the difference between admiring a magic trick and having tried the trick yourself.

^{Credit: @oldnapalm (Youtube)}

Third, it quietly solves the Tour’s oldest problem: it’s a three-week festival that leaves nothing behind for the fan to do. The Tour has always converted inspiration into bike-shop sales and little else. Now there’s a direct pipe: watch the stage, ride the stage, attempt the effort, chase the badge, and come back again tomorrow. The Tour becomes a three-week training block with the world’s best pacing footage and inspiration.

The honest understanding

A virtual Montmartre is not Montmartre: no crowd noise, no fear on the descents, no smell of July tarmac, of the sizzling heat, shivering cold or driving rain, and your avatar never has to eat 120 grams of carbs an hour in a crosswind. Riding a stage’s marquee climb is not riding a 180km stage; nobody’s doing the full Queen Stage before work. And there’s a commercial engine under all this romance: Zwift pays to be the Tour’s official platform precisely because July is when lapsed subscribers can be genuinely lured back. The participation revolution is also a retention strategy. Both things are true.

There’s also a slightly melancholy version of this piece, where “ride the Tour from your living room” becomes one more reason nobody stands on a mountainside for half a day with a flag. Are the people painting names on the Galibier ever going to swap the real-life experience for a trainer in their garage? I highly doubt it, but it’s worth saying out loud.

The point

None of those caveats changes the main point: the game is changing in July. The 2026 Tour is the first time the distance between the race and its fans won’t be measured by barriers and broadcast rights, but in whether you feel like riding tonight. That’s the ending point: the race is no longer just something to watch, but something you can experience.

For a hundred years the Tour asked one thing of us: watch. This one asks a better question: want a go? That’s the point, and it’s why the finish feels different.

My answer’s yes. I’ll be on the Montmartre cobbles on the final Sunday, a few hours after the pros, several watts short and entirely satisfied about it. Come find me there; it’s the first Tour de France with room for all of us on the course. That’s where this ends: not with watching, but with joining in.

Their argument, laid out in a letter dated 25 June, is blunt. The team, they write, is under the financial and political control of the UAE state, its principal sponsors are Emirates airline, owned by the government of Dubai, and XRG, the investment wing of Abu Dhabi’s state oil company, and it functions as a vehicle for the international branding of a government that, according to evidence cited from the UN Panel of Experts, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the US intelligence community, is the primary financial backer and arms supplier of the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan. The RSF stands accused by the UN of atrocities bearing the “hallmarks of genocide,” in a war that has killed more than 150,000 people and left over 30 million in need of humanitarian aid. The UAE denies supporting the RSF. The team’s response ran to nine words: “As a sports team, we don’t engage in geopolitical commentary.”

The UCI has said nothing. It almost certainly hopes the whole thing blows over by the time the flag drops in Barcelona. But the question remains difficult because it doesn’t have an easy answer: would cycling be better off or worse off if the UCI actually did it?

The case that cycling would be better

Let’s start with the difficult truth in the letter: cycling’s economics make it uniquely cheap to buy. There are no franchise fees, no transfer market, no gate receipts. A WorldTour team’s entire existence hangs entirely on sponsorship. FairSquare’s director, Nicholas McGeehan, put it brutally: the sport’s sponsor-driven model makes it “easy prey” for authoritarian states seeking positive public relations. For a fraction of what a football club costs, a government can put its name on the chest of the greatest rider of his generation and have the world chant its initials on the Champs-Élysées, which is precisely what happened when Pogačar and his teammates locked arms in Paris and chanted “U-A-E!”

And the UCI cannot claim its hands are tied, because it has done this before. In March 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, it stripped Gazprom-RusVelo of its licence1 and barred Russian team riders who had committed no offence, punished because of who paid their wages. The precedent exists, which means the current situation isn’t neutrality; it’s a choice about which atrocities trigger consequences and which don’t.

If the sport’s own governing body concluded in 2022 that a state’s conduct can disqualify its sporting vehicles, then declining even to review the licence of a team funded by a state credibly linked to genocide sets the bar, as BIRD’s director put it, dangerously low. A suspension would say the yellow jersey is not for sale to reputation launderers, and that message would echo well beyond cycling, into every sport wrestling with sovereign money at the moment.

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The case that cycling would be worse

Now the other side, and it’s weightier than most would think.

First, the human side. A licence suspension wouldn’t punish Abu Dhabi; it would punish roughly 30 riders and dozens of staff, including Slovenians, Mexicans, Brits, and Spaniards, none of whom have been accused of anything. Tadej Pogačar’s crime would be his employer. The sport would be telling its greatest talent since Merckx, days before he chases a record-equalling fifth Tour, that he’s collateral. Riders don’t get to choose the geopolitics of their sponsors any more than most of us get to interrogate the supply chains of ours.

Second, the standard of proof. The allegations against the UAE are supported by credible sources and concern the conduct of a state, not the team. The UCI is a sports regulator, not a tribunal for war crimes. Once it starts adjudicating governments, where is the line? The same letter flags Bahrain Victorious over Bahrain’s repression of dissent2. Astana carries Kazakh state money3. Israel-Premier Tech spent the 2025 Vuelta surrounded by protests. Ineos is bankrolled by petrochemicals4. A principled rule would be enormous in scope; an unprincipled one would be pure politics. The Russia precedent cuts both ways here; it can be read as proof the UCI acts only when the geopolitical wind makes it easy to do so.

Third, the money would not be replaced. Cycling is not drowning in sponsors; teams fold when one billionaire loses interest. Strip out Gulf backing (UAE, Bahrain, and the race sponsorships beyond them), and you don’t get a cleaner sport; you get a smaller, poorer one, with fewer jobs and fewer teams. Now don’t get me wrong, that’s not a reason to ignore genocide, but it is a reason the people running the sport will.

The ramifications, globally

Suppose Lappartient did it anyway. The team would fight it at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, with the best lawyers oil money can buy, and might well win. The UCI’s licensing rules were never written for this. The UAE Tour, a fixture on the UCI’s own WorldTour calendar, would become untenable, and the Gulf’s wider investment in the sport would be on notice. The precedent would reach into places this audience knows intimately: the same state money underwrites MyWhoosh, the platform on which the UCI runs its own Cycling Esports World Championships and which is currently indoor cycling’s great free alternative to Zwift. A UCI that bans UAE Team Emirates while holding its esports worlds on an Abu Dhabi virtual cycling platform would be a contradiction with a very short shelf life. And Sudan? A cycling ban would not stop a single bullet. Its value would be purely symbolic, which is not the same as worthless, since symbolism is exactly what the sponsorship buys, but nobody should pretend it’s aid.

So: better or worse?

Honestly? Both. Cycling would be morally better and materially worse. Cleaner conscience, thinner wallet, minus its brightest star through no fault of his own. Anyone who tells you the answer is obvious in either direction is hiding something.

But the binary also lets the UCI off too easily, because the real failure happened years ago, at the licensing desk. When this team was founded in 2017, one of its sponsors was a UAE military contractor that a UN panel had already cited for funnelling weapons into Libya, and the licence sailed through anyway. That’s the deeper issue here: the sport keeps accepting the money first and asking questions later (if at all). The letter’s second demand, the one getting no headlines, is the one that bites: develop a licensing policy with human rights due diligence built in, so the sport decides whom it sells its jerseys to before the world is chanting their name on the podium. The question isn’t really whether to throw Pogačar’s team out of the Tour. It’s whether cycling ever intends to look at the money before taking it.

Don’t expect an answer before Barcelona. The UCI’s silence, for now, IS the policy.

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First, the money

Nobody hosts the Tour for free. A French stage start costs a town somewhere in the region of €50,000 - €80,000, and a finish more like €80,000 - €120,000 and that registration fee is the cheap part. The real bill comes from the organisational load: closing and preparing roads, routing traffic, insurance, crowd barriers, medical and security cover. Those costs are frequently more than double the true outlay. When Digne-les-Bains1 hosted a finish, the all-in spend came to around €150,000.

Against that, the upside is genuine but conditional. Union Sport et Cycle estimates a host can see direct returns of up to five times the registration fee, and as much as half a million euros of extra activity across the month leading up to the day. Brittany’s 2021 Grand Départ2 cost roughly €2.3m of public money but pulled in 52,200 extra visitors and €4.35m in direct revenue. And the exposure value dwarfs all of it: one German host once valued its coverage at over €340m of advertising-equivalent worth against a fee of a few million. Billions of viewers across nearly 190 countries is a spotlight no small town could ever buy directly.

The word “conditional” is doing a lot of work there, though. Exposure only becomes euros if you have something to convert it with. That’s where the ten get seperated.

The safe bets: Tarragona and Granollers

The Catalan pair are the lowest-risk blessings on the list. Tarragona is a genuine tourist destination with Roman ruins, a coastline and the hotels to match and its exactly the kind of place that can turn a day of global television into next summer’s bookings. Granollers, on Barcelona’s doorstep, has the infrastructure and the metropolitan pull to absorb the crowds and bank the profile. For cities this size, a stage is a marketing deal with a near-guaranteed return. All blessing, no risk.

The high-reward gamble: Les Angles, Gavarnie-Gèdre and Plateau de Solaison

The mountain and ski stations are where the blessing is potentially the biggest and the effort the highest. A summit finish hands a resort the single most valuable asset in the whole broadcast: the helicopter “postcard,” minutes of sweeping aerial footage of its peaks beamed to the planet. For a destination trying to build its summer trade and fill winter beds, that’s tourism marketing you can’t put a price on.

But they pay the pricier finish fee, they wrestle with the hardest logistics of anyone with narrow access roads, altitude, weather and in Gavarnie-Gèdre’s case they’re operating inside a national park, with the associated access and environmental challenges. These towns will do very well out of 2026, but only if they’ve built a plan to catch the attention the cameras throw their way. High-reward, real work.

Between Efforts Podcast

The genuine gamble: Hagetmau, Malemort, Ussel and Thoiry

Here’s where the term “curse” can start to mean something. These small rural towns face a fee-plus-costs that is large relative to their modest municipal budgets, in exchange for what is essentially a single day party. The lasting economic return is uncertain, and the benefits skew heavily toward the intangible: a one-day windfall for the local cafés, campsites and bars; a galvanised army of volunteers; and the genuinely powerful but entirely unbankable feeling of having mattered when the world’s biggest race decided to pay a visit.

This is precisely the scenario that makes every town’s economist wince. The consensus on hosting big events is that the measurable impact is marginal at best and often negative, and that scepticism hits the hardest on the smallest hosts, who have the least capacity to convert a spike into something tangible. If you’re measuring purely in euros on a spreadsheet, these four are taking the biggest risk of the ten.

The outlier: Circuit Nevers Magny-Cours

The old Formula 1 track is in a category of one. It’s a commercial venue that stages events for a living, so for it the Tour isn’t a bet at all, it’s diversification (and not a new one at that, having hosted the Paris-Nice twice; in 2014 for a sprint finish won by John Degenkolb, and for the start of the third stage of the 2025 edition). This is an up-tick on an existing marketing strategy for the circuit and the wider Nièvre. Different motive, different risk profile, and far less on the line emotionally than for a village of a few thousand.

The saving grace

However, the scales tip back toward “blessing,” even for the small anxious towns, because of one crucial feature that separates a Tour stage from almost every other mega-event. It leaves nothing behind to maintain. No stadium, no Olympic village, no arena slowly rotting into debt. The same organisers who are gloomy about hosting are careful to note that the Tour demands no large-scale permanent facilities, which means it sidesteps the white-elephant trap that has bankrupted Olympic and World Cup hosts for decades.

And that changes everything. The worst case for Hagetmau or Ussel isn’t ruin; it’s a pricey, chaotic day that didn’t fully convert into lasting trade. The curse, when it comes, is more of a bruise and not a wound.

The verdict

So: a clear blessing for the seven cities and resorts with the infrastructure to turn worldwide exposure into actual revenue, and a limited-downside gamble for the three or four small towns, where the payoff is counted in pride and one unforgettable day far more than on the accounting ledger.

But even those small towns are betting with a safety net the Olympics can never offer. They won’t lose their shirts. At worst, they spend a bit too much on the best party they’ll ever throw (and the headaches that come with that) and for most of these ten, that’s a trade well worth making.

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And that, strangely, is the problem.

A hard route should mean an open race. This one doesn’t.

You’d think a parcours this brutal would create chaos, opportunities, ambushes, cracks for an underdog to exploit. But look at how it’s hard, not just how much. The 2026 route is climbing, climbing, and more climbing. Its lone individual time trial is a stubby 26 kilometres, the third-lightest allocation against the clock in twenty years. There are no cobbled sectors. There’s no gravel and as Ned Boulting pointed out, there aren’t even any obvious crosswind stages. ASO has built a mountain festival and stripped out almost everything else.

Let’s look at that more closely. Every one of those missing elements is a variable, a lever that lets someone who isn’t the best pure climber change the race, or a banana-skin that can ambush the favourite. A long time trial is a weapon for a Remco Evenepoel or a Jonas Vingegaard to claw back minutes with raw power. Cobbles, gravel and crosswinds are lottery days, the kind that have historically caught even the strongest GC riders out and turned a procession into a knife-fight. Take them all away, and you reduce a three-week race to a single question: who is the best climber in the world?

And we already know the answer to that question. His name is Tadej Pogačar, and the bookmakers have him at around 1.25.

The route doesn’t threaten the favourite. It suits him.

This is the quiet irony of the 2026 design. In chasing maximum mountain spectacle, the double Alpe d’Huez, the new summit finishes, the relentless vertical metres, ASO has produced a course that funnels the entire race toward the one discipline the runaway favourite happens to be the best in the world at. Rouleur summed Pogačar up in four words: he can do everything. So, a route that tests climbing above all else, and almost nothing else, isn’t a trap for him. It’s a red carpet.

A genuinely unpredictable route would have done the opposite. It would have hedged: a long, flat time trial to give the time-trial specialists a fighting chance, a cobbled stage to roll the dice, an exposed coastal day where a crosswind could split the race and put thirty seconds into a leader who drifted out of position. Variety is what democratises a Grand Tour. The 2026 Tour, for all its difficulty, has remarkably little of it.

In fairness to ASO

There’s a defence, and it deserves discussion. You cannot design a route that neutralises a generational talent without ruining the race for everyone else, and frankly, why should the organisers contort the Tour to engineer a closer contest? Hard mountains can produce magnificent racing; Vingegaard’s own famous wins came precisely by making the whole race relentlessly hard until Pogačar cracked. The mid-mountain and breakaway stages could still serve up thrilling days even with the GC settled. And it’s entirely possible a long flat time trial would simply have gifted Pogačar even more time, given he’s no slouch against the clock either. The organisers can’t be blamed for the fact that the strongest rider is also the most complete.

All true. But it rather proves the point. When the most interesting question about a route is “which design would best contain one man” and the answer keeps coming back “none of them” the sport has a competitive-balance problem that no parcours can solve.

So, is it the most uninspiring route in recent memory?

No. Genuinely, no. It might be one of the most spectacular. Two Alpe d’Huez finishes and a Montmartre showdown will produce images we’ll remember for years.

But spectacular and unpredictable are not the same thing, and 2026 has bought the first by quietly sacrificing the second. This isn’t the dullest Tour route in years. It may well be the most predictable one, a magnificent, merciless course that, in its devotion to the mountains, may have pre-written its own ending in the favourite’s favour.

The climbs will be breathtaking. Just don’t mistake breathtaking for uncertain.

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But, is he the right man for job? Even more than that, is the worry people that are reaching is the right worry. Will a director sitting in California be reduced to judging teenagers on power files he can’t verify in person.

On paper, there was never anyone else

Let’s start with the case for him, because it’s strong enough that Eric Min says he didn’t phone a second candidate. As a nineteen-year-old, Knickman helped take 3rd in Men’s Team Time Trial at the 1984 Summer Olympics. He raced at the top with La Vie Claire alongside Greg LeMond, then Toshiba-Look and 7-Eleven. He went on to coach the US national and Olympic road programs in the nineties, and then spent the better part of a decade running LUX, the best junior development team the United States has produced this century. The proof isn’t a mission statement; it’s a start list. Brandon McNulty, Quinn Simmons, Kevin Vermaerke, Kaia Schmid, and Makayla Macpherson all came through LUX with McNulty, Simmons and Vermaerke lining up at the 2022 Tour de France. If the brief is “develop North American teenagers into Tour-quality professionals,” there is a very short list of people in this space who have actually done it, and Knickman is at the top of that list.

So the pedigree isn’t in question. The interesting stuff is everything around it.

The numbers worry is the wrong worry

The obvious assumption is that because this is a Zwift team, talent will be picked the Zwift way - by the numbers - and that a coach who may not be able see most of his prospects in the flesh will be stuck trusting a spreadsheet. There are two problems with that.

First, this isn’t Zwift Academy. It’s a real racing team and the assumption is that riders will be at camps, in team cars, and in actual bunchies from 2027. In-person assessment isn’t a luxury this program might struggle to afford, it’s the entire operating model. Knickman will see these kids race, repeatedly, under fatigue, in the wet, in a crosswind. That’s the job.

Second, and more importantly, “Mr Motivation” is on record as one of the least numbers-besotted coaches in the sport. Ask him how he found talent at LUX and he doesn’t lead with peak power. He talks about the size of the engine, and then immediately follows up with how a rider rides, their style, their mentality, how hard they train, and the context around their results. He’s pointed out that some of his best riders were never the big-numbers kids, and that a fourth place earned with no coach and bad equipment can tell you more than a win bought with every advantage. That is the opposite of a man who needs a power file to recognise a future pro.

The real take here is that Zwift didn’t hire a data company’s idea of a talent scout. It hired a craftsman who reads riders the old school way, and that’s a feature, not a bug. So the real challenges must lie somewhere else, right?

The actual tension: a racecraft man inside a data company

The genuine question isn’t whether Knickman can do development. It’s whether a data-centric tech company can resist managing it like a data problem.

Its fair to say that Zwift’s whole instinct will be to quantify, funnel and optimise. Knickman’s whole method is slower, more human and harder to put on a web dashboard - time in Europe, distance in the legs, character under pressure, the patience to let a fifteen-year-old become a twenty-three-year-old without panicking. Those two cultures can absolutely coexist, but only if the parent company stands back and lets the developer develop. The failure mode isn’t Knickman judging kids by their watts; it’s a quarterly-results mindset leaning on a man whose craft doesn’t move on quarterly timelines.

Then theres the age problem to consider as well, one that butts up against Zwift’s own platform as the discovery engine: Zwift no longer accepts riders under sixteen. The program is targeting under-19s, some of them fifteen (Knickman started as a fourteen-year-old junior) which are ages that the platform itself now turns away. So the obvious “find them online” is partly bolted shut by Zwift’s own rules, which means identification across the US, Canada and Mexico will have to happen the unglamorous, in-person, boots-on-the-ground way. Which, again, is Knickman’s way. Ironically, the man fits the problem better than the platform does.

Ten years is the part that should scare everyone

If there’s a place to be sceptical, it isn’t the hire or the talent. It’s the deadline.

Developing WorldTour professionals, which LUX demonstrably did, is not the same thing as manufacturing a Tour de France podium finisher to a schedule. One is a repeatable process. The other needs that process and a generational engine and a decade of health, luck, team support and rivals who don’t happen to be Tadej Pogačar in his prime. You cannot project-manage a yellow-jersey contender into existence the way you’d ship a product feature, and anyone promising it within a fixed window is writing a cheque that physiology may decline to cash.

And here’s the irony Knickman knows better than anyone: LUX, for all its success, still died. Not from a lack of talent but from a lack of money. It folded at the end of 2022 because junior programs live and die on year-to-year funding that almost never holds.

However, this might be the silver lining and the smartest thing about this new project. It’s being anchored by a foundation and an endowment, with long-term backing from Zwift and private donors, specifically engineered to remove the funding cliff that killed his last team. Time and money are the two things development always runs out of. In theory, this program has both. Whether ten years is long enough to convert them into a champion is the big question, but at least the man chasing it won’t be doing it with one eye on whether the lights stay on.

The verdict

On paper, Knickman is the right appointment, and the power-numbers anxiety is largely a category error: he’s the cure for that disease, not a carrier of it. The risks worth watching are different and bigger, whether a fixed ten-year deadline is honest about how champions are actually made, and whether a data-first company can hold its nerve and let an old-school developer work at developer speed.

Put simply: I’d bet on the man. I’m just not sure anyone should bet on the timeline.

That’s not necessarily a disaster. Zwift makes a genuinely good product and the cross-compatibility wins are real. But anyone who’s watched a market consolidate knows what tends to follow: less pressure to innovate, fewer reasons to keep prices sharp, and a slow narrowing of choice. The thing that keeps a dominant player honest is viable competition, so it’s worth knowing exactly who’s still standing on their own two wheels.

Here are the independents that haven’t been absorbed, and who each one is actually for.

Biketerra: the indie that actually gets it

Biketerra is the scrappy underdog worth rooting for. Built by a small team, it’s browser-based , so no chunky install, just open a tab and go. Its whole pitch is freedom: upload any real-world route as a GPX file and it generates the 3D terrain, land cover, water and buildings from real data, then lets you ride it with an accurate physics simulation and minimal gamification.

That “minimal gamification” bit is the key. Where Zwift wants to entertain you with power-ups, route-badges and April foolsday nonesense, Biketerra wants to get out of the way and just give you a faithful ride with ERG, SIM, virtual shifting and HR-to-power modes, optional pacer bots, and one-click loading of .ZWO workouts or sessions from Intervals, TrainerDay and Athletica. It runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android, and the subscription is cheap by category standards (there’s a free tier to start). For the rider who finds Watopia a bit much and just wants real roads and honest physics, it’s a breath of fresh air.

Best for: purists, data nerds, and anyone who wants to ride real routes without the video-game layer.

TrainingPeaks Virtual: realism plus the training brain

TrainingPeaks Virtual (Indivelo for those that remember before Training Peaks acquired it) has quietly become one of the most credible alternatives, pairing some of the most realistic ride physics in the category with the planning and analysis ecosystem TrainingPeaks is known for. It’s bundled in with a TrainingPeaks Premium subscription, so if you already live in TP for your structured training, you essentially get the virtual platform thrown in. Planned workouts sync straight to the ride and the completed data flows back, FTP and all.

Best for: structured athletes already invested in TrainingPeaks who want indoor riding and analytics under one login.

The structured-training camp: Wahoo SYSTM and TrainerRoad

Not every alternative is a virtual world, can be the point. Wahoo SYSTM (the evolution of The Sufferfest) and TrainerRoad come at indoor riding from the opposite direction - no avatars, no scenery, just science-led structured training designed to make you faster. They’re not trying to beat Zwift at immersion; they’re betting that a lot of riders care more about the workout than the world it’s painted on. For time-crunched riders chasing FTP gains, they remain genuinely excellent.

Best for: riders who care about getting fitter more than where their avatar is pedalling.

MyWhoosh: the well-funded challenger

If anyone has the resources to go toe-to-toe with Zwift, it’s MyWhoosh. Founded in Abu Dhabi and funded out of the UAE, it’s completely free to use, which on its own makes it the most disruptive thing in the space. It offers virtual worlds, structured training plans, hundreds of workouts, and a serious racing calendar including the $1m MyWhoosh Championships in July.

The catch is that the funding model is also the strategy: this is a platform underwritten as a national soft-power and marketing play, not a business that has to turn a profit from your wallet. For riders, though, that’s mostly upside, pro-sized prize money, equal pay for women, and a price tag of nothing. If you race and you haven’t tried it, you’re leaving value on the table.

Best for: racers and budget-conscious riders who want a full-featured platform without a subscription.

Why this matters

You don’t have to leave Zwift to care about this. Even committed Zwifters benefit from a market where MyWhoosh is giving the product away, Biketerra is quietly nailing real-route physics, and TrainingPeaks is bundling realism into a training suite. Competition is the reason your subscription doesn’t quietly creep up every year and the reason features keep landing. The single healthiest habit you can build as an indoor rider is knowing your options and most of these will cost you nothing to try.

The map of indoor cycling now has one very big country in the middle of it. The independents around the edges are what keep the whole thing worth riding. Spin up a free trial on one of them this winter and see what you’ve been missing.

So before you do anything else: if you even think you might want in, go and complete your Power Passport now. We’ll get to why.

The Basics

The MyWhoosh Championships 2026 run from 7 to 14 July is a seven-day virtual stage race you ride from your own pain cave on your own hardware. Lowest cumulative time across the seven stages wins the GC, just like a real grand tour. The routes span flat, hilly and mountainous days, a Canada time trial on stage six, and a final showdown in Arabia.

The headline, of course, is the money. The prize fund sits at $1,000,000, split equally between men and women, and spread across six competitive categories rather than just lobbed at the overall winner. There are sprint and climbing classifications on top, plus team prizes.

The pitch from MyWhoosh’s esports director, Matt Smithson, is accessibility: the idea that an everyday rider who can hold around 3.5 w/kg (men) or 2.5 w/kg (women) has a real reason to line up and a real shot at a result. For one week, you get to find out what a pro’s stage-race week actually feels like, from your spare room.

That’s a brilliant hook, and it’s not a lie. But it’s worth reading the rest of the page.

Behind the press release

Here’s the number the announcement is quieter about: the size of the field. In 2025, the Championships drew around 650 starters from 47 countries. For an event built around a seven-figure purse, 650 is a somwhat dissappointing turnout. MyWhoosh’s stated ambition this year is to roughly double it. Whether they hit that target is the real measure of the 2026 event, far more than the dollar figure, which hasn’t actually changed since the inaugural 2023 edition.

And that dollar figure deserves context. MyWhoosh is free to use and funded out of the United Arab Emirates, the same backing behind the UAE Team Emirates squad that Tadej Pogačar rides for. Unlike Zwift, which has to fund itself through subscriptions, MyWhoosh doesn’t need to recoup a cent of that million. The purse isn’t a self-sustaining prize pool built on sponsors and media rights; it’s marketing spend. It buys attention, it pulls competitive riders onto the platform, and it gives MyWhoosh a flagship event to anchor a calendar around.

That’s not a criticism exactly, it’s just what it is. A million dollars of someone else’s money being handed out to cyclists is still a million dollars of someone else’s money being handed out to cyclists. But it does reframe the “anyone can win” messaging. Realistically, the GC money goes to former pros and dedicated esports specialists. The 2025 MyWhoosh men’s champion, New Zealander Michael Vink, is an ex-WorldTour rider with 12 major wins under his belt. The honest expectation for most of us isn’t a payday. It’s the gift pack and the “experience”.

The rumours are that gift packs will consist of real-world and virtual kit, as well as exclusive discounts. While a comprehensive line-by-line breakdown has not been published, a recent facebook comment suggests the pack will most likely inlcude: jerseys, bibs, a nice bag, gloves, a bottle and socks as well as exclusive digital avatar items for use within the MyWhoosh Platform and discounts from MyWhoosh partners and cycling brands.

Does it actually count as fair sport?

To MyWhoosh’s credit, they take the integrity question more seriously than some. Entry requires the Power Passport Test, a one-time verification of your power and weight data, and if you’ve raced their Sunday Race Club recently, chances are you may already be cleared. The platform’s anti-doping and integrity testing from SRC carries over to the Championships too.

In a world where weight doping and dodgy power numbers are the original sin of virtual racing, mandatory verification is the bare minimum done properly, and it’s a point in MyWhoosh’s favour.

The bigger picture

There’s a strategic story here too. With Zwift having swallowed Rouvy, FulGaz and Bkool, MyWhoosh is now the last big independent in indoor cycling and the only one with the financial firepower to throw a million dollars at a marquee event. The Championships are how it plants a flag: free platform, pro-sized prizes, equal pay for women, open to amateurs. That’s a sharp contrast to Zwift’s subscription-and-acquisition model, and it’s a contrast worth watching as the market consolidates.

So, should you enter?

If you’re a racer who has two seperate power-meters and likes a structured goal, absolutely. A seven-day stage race with classifications and a finisher’s gift pack is a genuinely fun way to spend a winter week down here in the Southern Hemisphere (or to keep the legs honest if you’re up north). Set your expectations around the experience, not the prize money, and you’ll have a great time.

Just don’t sleep on the admin. Registration closes 30 June, and you’ll want your Power Passport sorted well before the gun. The million dollars is mostly marketing, but the stage race is real, and it’s a good one.

It was exactly what you’d expect a freshly-acquired founder to say, and exactly what a sceptical community was never going to take at face value. The Road.cc and DC Rainmaker comment sections filled up with the usual, and not unreasonable, fears: one step closer to a monopoly, fewer real choices, price rise incoming. In an industry that has watched plenty of “nothing will change” acquisitions quietly become “everything changed,” that cynicism is justified.

So now, nearly two months on, it’s fair to ask the question that actually matters: are Zwift and Rouvy doing what they said they’d do?

What was actually promised

Let’s be precise about it, the two companies committed to a handful of concrete things from day one:

• Independent operation. Rouvy continues as a standalone platform with its own roadmap, team, and leadership, with Samek remaining CEO.

• Separate subscriptions. No merged apps, no combined Zwift-Rouvy bundle, and existing Rouvy subscriptions (loyalty discounts and pausing included) left untouched.

• Real routes remain core. Rouvy’s whole identity, the real-world video experience, is preserved rather than absorbed into Watopia-style animation.

• Hardware compatibility, immediately. From day one, Zwift ready trainers and the Zwift Ride smart frame would work with Rouvy, with Zwift Click V2 previously unsupported, finally playing nice too.

• More to come. “Further updates planned over the coming months” was the catch-all statement that deserved further scrutiny.

That last point is the one to watch, because it’s where intentions either turn into shipped features or quietly disappear.

What’s actually shipped since

Here’s where it gets interesting, because Rouvy hasn’t gone quiet. If anything, the platform has been busier in the last two months than a lot of independent apps are in a good quarter.

The hardware promise landed on launch day. That long-standing bugbear of owning Zwift kit and not being able to use it properly on Rouvy was resolved at the same time of the announcement, with remote device configuration flagged as a follow-up. That’s the clearest example of a promise made and immediately kept, and it’s the one that materially benefits riders who own both (well mostly Rouvy).

Then came Companion App 2.0 on 19 May. This is a genuinely substantial release: a redesigned companion that pulls in not just indoor rides but logged outdoor activity and cross-training including running, swimming, and strength with Garmin integration for training load, readiness scoring, and the ability to push structured Rouvy workouts out to a Garmin head unit for outdoor execution. Crucially, this is Rouvy’s vision of connecting indoor and outdoor training, and not just a bolted-on Zwift feature. It feels as if the roadmap survived intact post aquisition.

Most recently, on 16 June, Rouvy switched on Clubs, Communities and In-Ride Chat, its first serious move into the social and group-riding layer that Zwift has offered for years. You could be forgiven for being cynical and thinking that Rouvy borrowing that from its new owener’s playbook, but the more honest appraisal should be that Rouvy is finally addressing its own most-requested features, on its own terms, with its own branding.

So, is this the proof?

For now, cautiously you could say yes, this looks like the first real evidence that the acquisition promises weren’t just PR hype.

However, the tell isn’t any single feature. It’s the pattern. Three separate, substantive releases in under two months: hardware compatibility, a rebuilt companion app, and a social layer. This is not what a platform looks like when it’s being quietly mothballed or folded into its acquirer. It’s what an independent roadmap looks like when it’s still being executed. The subscription has stayed separate, the team and CEO are still intact, and the “real-routes” identity hasn’t been diluted by a single Watopian pixel.

But, and it’s an important but, let’s not hand out medals just yet. Two months is the honeymoon. The genuinely hard promises in any acquisition aren’t tested in the first quarter; they’re tested in year one and two, when the strategic logic of why you buy a competitor starts to make an appearance. The features shipped so far were almost certainly already in Rouvy’s pipeline before the handshakes were handed out, which makes them proof of continuity rather than proof of a healthy new arrangement. The real test is the first roadmap decision that gets made because of the acquisition, not in spite of it. And the question of whether “differentiated roadmaps” eventually means “deliberately kept apart” or “slowly converged” is a question only time answers.

There’s also the elephant that no feature release makes smaller: with Rouvy in the fold, Zwift’s dominance over indoor cycling is now near-total, and the competitive pressure that keeps any company honest now rests largely on MyWhoosh’s shoulders. Promises kept to riders and good outcomes for the market aren’t neccessarily the same thing.

The verdict

For now, I think we should give credit where it’s due. Zwift and Rouvy said the platform would keep shipping as itself, and for two months they have honoured this, visibly, repeatedly, and with its own voice. If you’re a Rouvy rider, the early signs are about as good as you could reasonably hope for.

However, the promises that are easy to keep have been kept. The ones that are hard to keep haven’t come due yet.

What’s actually new

The expansion bolts the Montmartre climb onto the existing Paris circuit, recreating the finishing loop that the real Tour borrowed from the Paris Olympic road races. It became an instant fan favourite in the real world, the kind of finale that turned a processional final stage into actual racing, and now we get to suffer up it ourselves. BANG!

Don’t let the word “climb” fool you into thinking this is an Alpe du Zwift situation. The Montmartre ascent is short and sharp: roughly 0.6km at an average gradient of around 4.7%. On paper that’s nothing. In practice, a punchy cobbled kicker dropped into the middle of an otherwise pan-flat parcours is exactly the sort of thing that blows a bunch to pieces. It’s a sprinter’s nightmare and a puncheur’s playground, and it gives the Paris map something it has never really had: a selective point where races are won and lost.

Zwift has also hinted that the new roads will be carved into a stack of fresh route combinations rather than a single out-and-back, so the value here goes beyond one climb. After more than three years without a brand-new world, and with Paris untouched since it first launched, this is the most meaningful refresh the map has ever had.

Why now?

The timing isn’t an accident. Zwift remains the official software platform for the Tour de France and the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, and the company is clearly lining this up to ride the hype as the real race kicks off.

And that’s where the Tour Fever Challenge comes in. Running from 2 July to 16 August, it’s a six-week celebration of the racing season built around five stages of rides and races across the updated Paris map, with five new badges to chase. If you’re the type who likes a reason to log on beyond “I probably should,” this is a tidy little campaign to structure your July and August around — and a neat excuse to learn the new roads before everyone else does.

What it’ll feel like for the rest of us

Here’s the honest take from someone who is not a 5 w/kg whippet. A 0.6km cobbled ramp is the great equaliser. It’s short enough that you can absolutely send it, but steep enough that going too deep too early will leave you cross-eyed and dangling off the back over the top. If you’ve ever raced a crit with a little drag to the line, you know what I mean.

For newer Zwifters, this is one of those features that makes the platform feel connected to real cycling. You’re riding a climb that pros contested in front of millions, in a city symbolic to the sport. That’s a different feeling to grinding out laps in Watopia, and it’s the kind of thing that hooks people.

For the competitive riders amongst us, expect the Paris races to get a lot more interesting overnight. Any course with a repeated punchy climb rewards positioning, timing, and the discipline to not detonate on the first time up.. so get your powerup game sorted.

The bigger picture

Zwift has spent this whole season talking about meeting riders where they are: outdoor integration, planning tools, and recommendations nudging you to actually go ride your bike outside. Dropping a faithful recreation of a current, iconic real-world climb helps to balance the two worlds, and gives Paris some fresh cultural weight rather than just words of encouragement.

Whether Zwift keeps the momentum going and expands Paris further from here and if so, “when” is the open question. For now, though, the capital is finally worth a revisit.

The map is live today. Go find out how your legs feel on cobbles and I’ll see you at the top of the climb, or probably getting dropped on it.

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In the same era that Zwift stopped accepting new under-16 riders (its kids page now turns away parents asking to set up accounts for younger children) the company has unveiled a junior development team with one of the loudest goals in the sport..

The squad, built with Canyon and Pedal Mafia and run by veteran director Roy Knickman, will field under-19 men and women from the United States, Canada and Mexico. Under-19 means some of these prospects are fifteen. Fifteen-year-olds the platform itself currently won’t allow access.

Set those two facts side by side and a strange question falls out: how do you develop the next generation on a platform the next generation isn’t allowed to use?

The honest answer begins with a definition nobody has actually resolved yet. Is Zwift even social media? Australia’s world-first under-16 ban, in force since December 2025, doesn’t catch everything. It exempts online gaming, fitness and health apps, which is why Roblox and Steam stay open to kids while Instagram and Facebook slam shut. Zwift will argue it belongs firmly in the first group: it’s a smart trainer with scenery, not a social media feed. Probably right. But not airtight. Zwift has chat, clubs, group rides and “ride-ons” which is a thumbs-up that behaves an awful lot like a “like,” the precise sort of feedback feature regulators have started flagging. And nobody at the platform gets to decide the question; eventually a court does. So Zwift sits in a grey zone partly of its own making: selling community and connection in its marketing, while needing to insist, when it counts, that it’s only a game.

Which leads to the tough question - is this team development, or is it marketing? The people building it don’t seem to draw the line. Canyon’s founder openly framed the project as a chance to learn about delivering value to sponsors in a “social-first” era. The trade press talks about building a fanbase before anyone has won a race. None of that is sinister; it’s how modern sport runs. But it’s worth saying plainly: a development team can race in the real world without a single rider ever opening an app.

So what is the payoff that the company is really chasing? A generation that grows up inside its ecosystem and never leaves, which is exactly the lifelong loyalty that under-16 laws are being written to interrupt.

There’s geography in it, too. The pipeline points squarely at North America, the one major market that has stayed out of the under-16 fight, while Britain drafts its own ban and Australia, a historic factory of junior cycling talent, pulls kids off social platforms entirely. Does Zwift realise that they need to develop this funnel whilst North American laws still allow it?

And the clock is the magnifying glass. Tadej Pogačar is the youngest Tour de France stage winner in the last 10 years, winning his first stage at the 2020 Tour de France (Stage 9) at just under 22 years-old. A ten-year goal means the rider who might stand in Paris around 2036 is twelve to fifteen years old today: the exact cohort the world is busy logging off. The regulations are tightening, not loosening.

None of this makes the ambition wrong. A well coached, structured, parent-supported path into sport may be one of the healthiest things a kid can do online, the opposite of the doomscrolling, bully-infested environments these laws were written to stop. But Zwift can’t have it both ways indefinitely. Sooner or later it has to say what it is: a game that develops champions, or a platform that markets to children. The Tour goal is bold and admirable. The honesty about why is the part still missing.