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It’s official! After a first announcement last year, Zwift and the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) are formalizing the date of the first UCI Cycling Esports World Championships. December 8 and 9, 2020 are therefore dates to mark in stone. They pave the way for a brand new cycling discipline, while ensuring the continuation of competitions in a context that makes holding gatherings increasingly complex.
Source: Press Release
The 2020 UCI Cycling Esports World Championships are the result of discussions between Zwift, the global online training and competition platform for athletes, and the Union Cycliste Internationale. As such, they will be entirely hosted on Zwift and will meet the high standards of an international event.
Zwift CEO and co-founder Eric Min states: “We are thrilled to finally unveil the plans for the first UCI Cycling Esports World Championships. 2020 has been a big year for esports, as it has helped fill the void left by traditional sports. Going forward, we hope to make this sport a new discipline, not to fill gaps, but to be truly complementary to other disciplines, whether it’s road, cyclocross or mountain biking. There is a huge opportunity to grow the sport with esports and I am proud that together with the UCI, we can lead the way.”
The 2020 UCI Cycling Esports World Championships will bring together Elite men and women who will compete on identical courses and distances. The two 2020 UCI World Champions – one man, one woman – will receive the famous rainbow jersey which they will wear in sanctioned cycling esports events in 2021. Riders will compete for this inaugural world title remotely, from their homes or training centers.
The UCI will allocate participation quotas to National Federations, which will be announced at a later date, based on three criteria: UCI Road rankings (as of June 2020), the number of riders registered in a “Registered Testing Pool”, and the number of eligible riders on the Zwift platform. Automatic invitations will be sent by the UCI to National Federations represented by the largest number of riders of each sex on the Zwift platform. This concerns 20 National Federations (Italy, Belgium, France, Netherlands, Australia, Spain, United States, Great Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Denmark, Poland, Austria, Colombia, New Zealand, South Africa, Norway, Ireland, Japan) for the men’s event and 13 National Federations (Netherlands, Italy, Australia, France, United States, Germany, Belgium, Great Britain, Poland, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Japan) for the women’s event.
The UCI may grant additional invitations to individual riders. The objective is to ensure that all five continents are represented in both the women’s and men’s races and that it is possible to achieve the same total number of entries for both women and men.
As part of their partnership, the UCI and Zwift are committed to ensuring the sporting credibility of the
competitions through the development of a sufficiently reliable program to be used in UCI-sanctioned events, a verification protocol to validate rider performance and guard against any cases of fraud, and a rider identification system (identity, weight, and height).
Further information on the details of the UCI World Championships course and the quotas allocated to National Federations will be unveiled later.
UCI President David Lappartient states: “It is with great pleasure that we are able
to confirm the dates and plans for the first UCI Cycling Esports World Championships. The year has certainly been difficult for everyone, but cycling is now back and we look forward to having a new major event at the end of 2020. Virtual racing has been widely successful during this period when competitions were on hold and I sincerely believe in the potential of cycling esports to help increase the reach of our sport. This is a great moment for
cycling.”
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