<![CDATA[Nathan Krake: Zwift]]>https://www.nathankrake.com/s/zwifthttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Aqsf!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc4a7a767-9341-4425-b242-155e9d39c634_600x600.pngNathan Krake: Zwifthttps://www.nathankrake.com/s/zwiftSubstackSat, 08 Aug 2026 11:26:06 GMT<![CDATA[The Right Man, the Wrong Worry: Roy Knickman and Zwift’s Ten-Year Gamble]]>https://www.nathankrake.com/p/the-right-man-the-wrong-worry-royhttps://www.nathankrake.com/p/the-right-man-the-wrong-worry-royTue, 30 Jun 2026 01:42:23 GMTZwift has handed Roy Knickman one of the loudest jobs in cycling: take a brand-new North American under-19 team, built with Canyon and Pedal Mafia, and use it to put a North American rider on the top step of the Tour de France podium inside ten years. No pressure.

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.

LUX Cycling women at Giro Toscana International Femminile (Image credit: LUX/CTS p/b Specialized)

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

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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.

L-R Mathieu van der Poel, Philip Roodhooft (GM Alpecin–Premier Tech & Fenix–Premier Tech), Christoph Roodhooft (Directeur Sportif Alpecin–Premier Tech) & Zwift CEO Eric Min

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.

L-R Jonas Vingegaard (Team Visma–Lease a Bike) , Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) finished first overall, and Florian Lipowitz (Red Bull–Bora–Hansgrohe)

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.

]]><![CDATA[Cobbles in the Capital: Zwift’s Paris Map Finally Gets Its Montmartre Climb]]>https://www.nathankrake.com/p/cobbles-in-the-capital-zwifts-parishttps://www.nathankrake.com/p/cobbles-in-the-capital-zwifts-parisFri, 26 Jun 2026 01:52:33 GMTFor years, the Paris map has been one of Zwift’s prettiest postcards and one of its most underused. You’d roll out onto the flat Champs-Élysées circuit, tick the badge, and probably never go back (or at least not for a while). As of today, that changes. And if you watched the back end of last year’s Tour de France (or the 2024 Olympics), you’ll know exactly why this map matters.

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!

Video credit: Youtube @oldnapalm Rider: C. Emer & Reddit OP u/ExcellentCoyote9310

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.

All screenshots & video credit: Youtube @oldnapalm

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.

Visit @oldnapalm on you Youtube

]]><![CDATA[Zwift Won’t Let Kids In. So How Does It Plan to Build a Champion?]]>https://www.nathankrake.com/p/zwift-wont-let-kids-in-so-how-doeshttps://www.nathankrake.com/p/zwift-wont-let-kids-in-so-how-doesWed, 24 Jun 2026 01:59:27 GMTWhilst listening to Episode 3 of The Wattage Cottage podcast and more specifically, Zwift’s goal of establishing a junior development program, I realised that there is a quiet contradiction sitting beneath Zwift’s boldest announcement in years, and it’s worth holding up to the light.

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..

..to put a North American rider on the top step of the Tour de France within a decade.

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.

L-R Mathieu van der Poel, Philip Roodhooft (GM Alpecin–Premier Tech & Fenix–Premier Tech), Christoph Roodhooft (Directeur Sportif Alpecin–Premier Tech) & Zwift CEO Eric Min

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.

The athletic mission doesn’t need Zwift. The brand mission does.

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.

Tadej Pogačar winning his first stage at the 2020 at the age of 21

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.

]]><![CDATA[12 hours to ride up as many climbs as possible]]>https://www.nathankrake.com/p/12-hours-to-ride-up-as-many-climbshttps://www.nathankrake.com/p/12-hours-to-ride-up-as-many-climbsFri, 19 Jun 2026 11:47:47 GMTIt’s a 36 hour virutal cycling event in which participants attempt to ride a distance of 400km and 10,000m and all of it uphill!

Discord Channel:
RAZ410 Voice Chat: https://discord.gg/y8Zjzr2e5

More Information:

Head over to NathanKrake.com for information and links to join the events:
https://www.nathankrake.com/p/raz410

Zwift Event Links (in UTC time):
FRANCE MAP
9:00 AM Ventoux KOM - https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620680
11:00 AM Petit KOM - https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620761

WATOPIA MAP
11:30 AM Alpe du Zwift KOM - https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620769
1:00 PM Epic KOM, Radio Tower KOM, Titans Grove KOM Reverse - https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620776
2:15 PM Epic KOM Reverse - https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620778
2:45 PM The Volcano KOM - https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620779
3:15 PM Titans Grove KOM - https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620786
4:00 PM Mayan Mountainside KOM, ITZA KOM & The Grade - https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620792
4:45 PM Zwift KOM Reverse - https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620803
5:00 PM Zwift KOM - https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620806
5:10 PM Jarvis KOM Reverse - https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620810
5:25 PM Jarvis KOM - https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620813

SCOTLAND MAP
6:00 PM Sgurr Summit North & South KOM https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620819

LONDON MAP
6:15 PM Fox Hill, Leith Hill, Box Hill & Keith Hill KOM https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620822

MAKURI ISLANDS
7:15 PM Temple KOM, Castle KOM https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620848
7:30 PM Temple KOM Reverse https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620850
8:00 PM Rooftop KOM https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620851

INNSBRUCK
8:15 PM Innsbruck KOM https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620852
9:00 PM Innsbruck KOM Reverse https://www.zwift.com/events/view/5620853

So if you want to come and join me, click an event link and join in. You don’t have to complete the whole thing, just come along for a ride and chat.

]]><![CDATA[Why am I Cycling & Live Streaming for 12 Hours?]]>https://www.nathankrake.com/p/raz410https://www.nathankrake.com/p/raz410Thu, 18 Jun 2026 08:31:54 GMTHey everyone, this weekend I’m live streaming for 12 hours whilst I attempt to cycle up as many climbs on Zwift as I can…. and I need your help!

Flamme Rouge Racing is hosting its annual charity ride event - the RAZ410.

What’s the RAZ410?

I’m glad you asked!

It’s a 36 hour virutal cycling event in which individual participants attempt to ride a distance of 400km and 10,000m and all of it uphill!

Why?

To raise money for charity of course.. including

You decide how you tackle it, how much you do or how long you go for, but just so you know, there are 41 climbs to cover, so start getting ready!

So, I need your help!

Now, I don’t know if I can do all of that, but I am going to attempt to ride and climb continuously for 12 hours whilst I live stream it in glorious HD and I need you to jump on your bike and come and join me.

Even if it’s for part of a climb, every bit of help will be welcome!

I’ve created a number of meetups for as many climbs as possible and the links are below (don’t worry, even if you miss a meetup start, you can simply find me and ride with me - easy peasy I think..)

The Zwift event meetups are listed below. So if you miss one, you can join the next one.

When is this happening?

I’m starting Saturday, the 20th (this weekend) at UTC 9:00 am, which is:

  • Pacific Time, 2:00 am

  • Central Time, 4:00 am

  • Eastern Time, 5:00 am

  • British Summer Time, 10:00 am

  • Australian Eastern Time, 7:00 pm

Yep, that’s right - this is going to be an all nighter here in Melbourne, Australia!

The link to the live stream is below as well as a link to the FRR discord channel and other resources if you want to find out more.

Resources & more information

Get a head start on the donations by clicking the BuyMeACoffee link. Every cup you buy will go towards helping kids and families and I’m going to need as many cups as I can to get me through this ;)

Zwift Event Links (in UTC time):

FRANCE MAP

WATOPIA MAP

SCOTLAND MAP

LONDON MAP

MAKURI ISLANDS

INNSBRUCK

So if you want to come and join me, click an event link and join in. You don’t have to complete the whole thing, just come along for a ride and chat..

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