Is Virtual Cycling a Professional Sport?

A debate on whether virtual cycling is a professional sport.

Hi everyone,

Something a bit different on the Substack today, with an in-depth piece diving deep into the debate regarding whether virtual cycling is a professional sport. This piece is courtesy of Pro E Cycling which is one of the best substacks regarding all things virtual cycling. There seems to be a lack of coverage regarding e-sports cycling, but the Pro E Cycling substack does a brilliant job of keeping readers informed of all things Zwift and more.

You can check the substack down below and I thoroughly recommend subscribing if you haven’t already, it would be great if you could show some support if it sounds interesting to you. I have also done a piece for their Substack, a preview for the upcoming Paris-Roubaix Femmes Avec Zwift which will also be available to read over there today. My preview for the men’s race will be out on Friday on this Substack.

Thank you all for the support on this substack, it means a lot. Things have been pretty quiet over the last few weeks due to some tech issues and the fact that I’m currently away on holiday. I aim to try and be more consistent over the coming weeks and months and if you have any requests for different types of pieces you would like me to cover, comment below on the substack app or drop me an email. Also, any comments, debate and feedback on the previews is very welcomed as I love to hear your thoughts and feelings regarding upcoming races.

Many thanks, and I hope you enjoy this piece as I did,

Joe Morgan

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In the years since the start of the pandemic, indoor cycling has boomed. Zwift passed the one million paid subscriber threshold last year; upstart platforms like MyWhoosh are flush with cash and ready to spend; and new platforms continue to be developed and sold.

Amidst the hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of people using indoor platforms for structured training, to get through a rainy day, or just because, well, life gets busy, a burgeoning new cycling discipline is rapidly professionalizing: virtual racing.

I know, I know, I can hear your skepticism through the page as I write this. But at this point, virtual cycling is undisputedly a professional sport. It might not be one traditional cycling fans follow, and it might not even be one that is sustainable in its present form past the current moment. But it is a pro sport now. Let me prove it to you.

The Platforms and the Money

There are a number of indoor cycling apps, but only two have waded into the professional scene: Zwift and MyWhoosh. Zwift needs no introduction, but it’s possible you’ve only heard of MyWhoosh from seeing their logo on Pogi’s butt as he drops the pro peloton for another monument/grand tour win.

MyWhoosh is an Emirati company with “ties to serious investment - traced back to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the son of the founder of the UAE.” State-backed investment in MyWhoosh (and on the road through UAE Team Emirates) has been well documented, as has the sportswashing of it all.¹From DC Rainmaker:

While MyWhoosh gets skittish around their investors, the simplified version is the lead/primary investor is the government of the [UAE], just like it is for Team UAE Emirates and countless other sport/tourism efforts. Their CEO is Akhtar Saeed Hashmi, also the CEO of numerous UAE entities including Royal Technology Services (RTS) and Mauqah Technology. RTS is a subsidiary of The Royal Group, that is ultimately headed by [Sheikh Tahnoon]. This holdings group is responsible for some $26 billion worth of assets, as part of the UAE’s International Holdings Group (IHC).

For the purposes of this article though, the upshot is that MyWhoosh has some seriously deep pockets, and has elected to spend that money doing everything it can to make virtual cycling a professional sport.

In 2024, MyWhoosh paid out more than $3.75 million in prize money to riders racing on their platform, and in 2025 that number should exceed $4 million.²Contrast that with Zwift, where the total prize purse for the most recent Zwift Games totaled approximately $112,700 and the total prize purse for Zwift World Series was slightly higher at $133,400, a total of just under $250,000 for the entirety of the 2024-2025 season.³ Not nothing. But measly in comparison to the MyWhoosh numbers.

Still, that’s a lot of money getting thrown around at virtual cyclists. In 2024, the top rider by Pro E Cycling’s metrics, Kathrin Fuhrer, took home almost $170,000 in prize money, and at least nine other top riders were over$50,000. These numbers don’t account for sponsorships either, which admittedly seem limited in the virtual space but do exist.⁴

No, this isn’t the €8 million Pogi is reportedly taking home this year. But it’s enough for some of the top riders to focus exclusively on virtual cycling as their career. And that’s something.

The Pro Race Calendar

At the moment, there are four virtual races in the 2024-2025 season that Pro E Cycling classifies as “professional.”⁵ They are:

1. The UCI World Championship: There have been four editions of the UCI World Championships thus far. The first three were on Zwift, but in 2023 MyWhoosh stole the race away after reportedly offering seven figures to host for 2024, 2025, and 2026. Just like with any other UCI World Championship, the winner gets to wear a rainbow jersey, and as a fun fact the $15,000 in prize money paid out to the 2024 winners - Jason Osborne and Kate McCarthy - was more than the prize money Tadej Pogačar and Lotte Kopecky took home after winning world championships on the road last year ($8,500).⁶

   1. The World Championship is the only UCI-sanctioned race. The UCI has, for years now, been making vague statements about creating a race calendar and ranking system, but we have yet to see specifics or anything concrete. And, similar to the development of gravel racing, top riders have expressed skepticism that the UCI has anything to offer the sport.

2. Zwift Games Championship: After MyWhoosh bought away the UCI World Championship, Zwift sort of said “f*#@ it, we can do our own championship.” And it kind of worked. Zwift Games kicked off last year and just finished its second edition. Zwift Games consists of three individual championships - the Sprint, the Climb, and the Epic - with a single GC champion crowned based on points scored across the three.⁷

3. Zwift World Series: This year, Zwift canceled its longest running professional race series (I was pretty upset about it) and introduced the Zwift World Series. ZWS is a five stage race, with open qualifiers for community racers on Zwift to qualify to race against the pros. The next stage is April 10, if you care to watch.

4. Sunday Race Club: Finally, there is Sunday Race Club. This race is MyWhoosh’s bread and butter. As the name implies, there is a race every Sunday, and the payouts are massive. Every week, the winner takes home over $2,000, with payouts over $1,000 to the other podium finishers and less than that through the top ten. The series culminates with the “finals” on the last Sunday of each month, which is the race Pro E Cycling counts in our ranking system. The finals include payouts for team results as well.

As you might imagine, the history of professional races includes a lot of one-offs and races that were canceled after one or two editions. At Pro E Cycling, we’ve meticulously culled through the history of the sport, identified the races that qualify as professional, and created a database with all the race results. You can find that here if you are interested.

Sustainability

At the start of this article, I said that virtual cycling is undisputedly a professional sport. The core of the argument is that: (i) there is fully-fledged professional calendar, and (ii) at least the top riders are making enough money to quit their day jobs and do this full time.

Those things are true, and by themselves are sufficient, I think, to support the conclusion that the sport is currently professional. But is it sustainable?

The honest answer is I don’t really know. Zwift is a commercial entity bound by profit motives, and it seems like the money they pay out for Zwift Games and Zwift World Series is commensurate with the advertising value they - and the sponsors, which for Zwift Games this year included Shimano, Oakley, and nimbl - get from the events.

For MyWhoosh though, it’s less clear. This is just speculation, but it seems like they just have money to burn on the sport and don’t really care about profitability. The MyWhoosh CEO has described their investors as effectively altruistic: “We have a group of private investors and all of them are very much into the cycling industry and want to serve the community rather than generate income out of it.”⁸ So maybe the spigot stays on, but whether it does is sort of up to the opaque whims of MyWhoosh’s investors.

Needless to say, it’s not great if the future of the sport is beholden to a government that, in the words of Human Rights Watch, “has promoted a public image of tolerance and openness through hosting events like [the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference] while restricting scrutiny of its rampant systemic human rights violations and fossil fuel expansion.” But for fans of road cycling, this is nothing new and is entirely par for the course. So maybe it’s not surprising that as virtual cycling grows, the money flowing into the sport is coming from many of the exact same sources.

To be crystal clear here: none of this is meant to denigrate any of the fabulous riders we have in this sport. If I were good enough, I’d be quitting my job and earning a living from virtual cycling as well. I’d do that in a heartbeat. But it’s impossible to disentangle these questions from a discussion about the future of virtual cycling.

Fortunately, there is another aspect that I know is sustainable: the community. The origins of elite virtual racing were effectively just the best community racers banding together and saying “huh, we should all race each other.” The first pro race in our database, the KISS Super League, was a 2019 exhibition of the top community Zwift teams facing off against pro road teams. And that spirit of high-level, community-driven racing lives on today with a host of series like Zwift Racing League, Flamme Rougue Racing, and a bunch of others.

So while the economics and structure of professional virtual racing may - and almost certainly will - change, I’m confident that there will always be organic, bottom-up interest in the sport. And as long as that is the case, there will be some form of elite/professional virtual racing as well. We at Pro E Cycling will be there to follow all of it. You can sign up to join us here .

1

I’ve discussed the sportswashing issue in a separate post, linked above, though have relied on other reporting for the details of it all (again, linked above or in my prior post).

2

These numbers also include payouts to non-professional riders in lower categories in Sunday Race Club, though the figures for the elite category are highest.

3

Both by my calculations. Total prize purses include the (equal) prize money for both men’s and women’s events.

4

Of course, sponsorship money isn’t publicly available. The numbers provided in this paragraph come from Chris Schwenker’s excellent research, linked above, looking at publicly available results and prize money in 2024.

5

What makes a race “professional” is a fascinating debate that I won’t get into here, but there is a full explanation on our site here.

6

Yes, yes, obviously prize purses on the road are less important to salaried riders than in the virtual space where the prize money is the main salary.

7

Virtual racing tends to use points formats for GC rather than time. Think the green jersey competition in the Tour, except for GC (more or less).

8

Yes, you can and should read this quote in the context of the sportswashing conversation above.