Days before the UCI Cycling Esports World Championships, Zwift user Luciano Pollastri took to a burner blog account to publish 'The Ultimate Undetectable Weight Cheat on Zwift', which outlined how, using the Zwift companion app, users could alter their weight mid-race to gain a performance advantage.
Given the sensationalist nature of the title, which made no plea in itself for the bug to be fixed, Zwift proceeded to slap Luciano with a 30 day shadowban, meaning he could still use the platform, but his avatar would not show up for other users, and his results would not feature either.
Following what many in the community deemed an ill-judged knee-jerk reaction, given that the article was released as a plea for the issue to be resolved, Zwift proceeded to rescind the shadowban 48 hours later.
Despite the best efforts of Zwift in the realm of transparency and the role of dual recording, weight-doping appears to be an issue that won’t go away for the indoor cycling platform.
As the platform is almost exclusively used at home, out of sight of any third party monitoring, scope for cheating is ever-present, and usually takes the form of manipulating data to strategically improve performance. Broadly speaking, this data manipulation can be broken down into three categories:
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