The Zwift Academy, the programme which provided a WorldTour pathway for pro cyclists like Jay Vine and Neve Bradbury, has been put on pause, as Zwift steps back from elite racing.
The news was broken by Escape Collective on Monday, and will mean that the forthcoming Zwift Games will not have an elite category. The first UCI Cycling Esports World Championships were held on Zwift in 2020, but the event moved to MyWhoosh in 2024, where they will be again held this year.
There is still the Zwift Racing League, which re-launched this week, which comes with improvements to the ranking system to better match riders by ability, and new anti-botting technology to protect fairness. More than 30,000 riders take part in virtual races yearly.
The Zwift Academy will return, a spokesperson for the brand said, but it will not be held this year. The global hunt for talent on the platform saw tens of thousands of riders across the world compete for places in finals, where one male and one female cyclist earned a pro contract with Alpecin-Deceuninck and Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto respectively. Vine and Bradbury both won the competition in 2020, and have gone onto win multiple WorldTour races.
"Zwift Academy has not been cancelled," the spokesperson told Escape. "The next edition of Zwift Academy will be the 10th anniversary. Taking a year out gives us the space we need to properly re-launch the program. We want to make the 10th year the biggest yet, with a clearer focus on talent ID and a better Zwift Academy Finals production as well."
However, elite racing will not run on Zwift in the near future, not organised by the brand itself anyway.
"It was always our plan to assess the opportunity for Zwift Games, and the reasons we have decided not to run an Elite competition are the same as the Zwift World Series," the Zwift spokesperson said.
"We are focusing our efforts on community racing. Zwift has helped bring millions of people into the sport, many of whom would never have tried racing before. However, the sport needs a bigger pool from which to grow viewership and from which new talent can emerge," the spokesperson added, speaking of Zwift's commitment to a "bottom up" approach that prioritises the broad community.
"Updating our categorisation approach for all of our community racing experiences has been a key initiative over the past year or so," they continued. "The simple aim has been to make every single race closer and better matched for riders across the full ability spectrum on Zwift. Over the last year, this has resulted in community racing being 64% closer as defined by the Inter Quartile Range of race finish times."
The spokesperson did add: "If an organisation were to express a desire to use the Zwift platform and commit to managing broadcast and performance verification, then we'd be willing to hear them out."
This month, Zwift announced coming features, including a Brompton World Championships on the platform, new Zwift Click controllers, new training tools and more. Updates to the Wahoo Kickr Core 2 and Bike Pro and Zwift Ride Smart Bike were also announced.
