While cheating happens every day, all day, on Zwift and other virtual cycling platforms. Every few months there exists a story worth writing about. And today is one of those days. I’m out riding, running, and swimming a stupid number of miles this week (testing a very diverse set of things), but reader I wanted to take a brief moment to acknowledge the hilarity of the situation that came across my inbox. Sent in via DCR Reader, Alex, this one takes the cake.
As you may remember, back in December (2022), the winner of one of the UCI World Championship qualifiers was disqualified. The event he was actually disqualified for occurred a moth earlier in November during a 27.2KM stages that was more or less balls to the wall from start to finish (I suppose most Zwift races are). Except, our disgraced heroin Mr. Eddy Hoole decided to take his balls beyond the wall – and on the final climb towards the finish, he pushed essentially beyond human limits. He held 8 w/kg for 4 minutes up that climb, peaking at times at 10 w/kg. Again, all after 30 minutes of theoretically all-out riding.
Here’s an image from that very livestream, showing that very moment of Mr. Eddy Hoole:
Just after crossing the line (41:23) as the winner, announcer Nathan Guerra says:
“He took on with an amazing effort, something we’ve almost never seen before”…“that is one of the best efforts, I literally have ever seen for a catch on Zwift, to go flying right on by, Eddy Hoole just did what I thought was absolutely impossible”.
Which, would turn out to be true. It wasn’t possible, and is largely beyond known human performance levels.
Zwift launched an investigation, and as usual they’d throw down a pile of data showing Hoole cheated. And while there’s some debate on how exactly he cheated, the gist of it is that either he did a man in the middle attack, or he tweaked his power meter/trainer calibration values to provide higher wattages. Point being, it was super clear he dorked with it, and thus, was disqualified. Again, I wrote tons about this before here.
Anyways, fast forward to this month, and Mr. Hoole has decided that with his Zwift & UCI ban in place, he’s going to take a whirl at MyWhoosh, a competitor to Zwift. MyWhoosh recently announced some massive prize purses, ones that frankly make Zwift look a bit cheap. But then again, Zwift does have to theoretically make money and appease investors. MyWhoosh has a bit more flexibility there.
He entered a race series called SRC – or Sunday Race Club, which has a prize pool of $314,000USD per month. Yes, month. Again, money be flowin’ like a champagne room around these parts. Note that in theory, riders must complete a verification video, roughly similar to what other platforms require.
And on March 12th, he did just that. It’s a bit challenging to see after-the-fact if he won the race. But based on his stats, I’m going to guess he did. That in turn caught the attention of the MyWhoosh Facebook group, where a rider asked MyWhoosh to look into things:
To the surprise of everyone that’s ever used a Facebook page for a company, said company actually responded:
After that point, the time-space historical continuum stops until today, when someone (DCR Reader Alex), noting that Eddy Hoole had been disqualified in the results. We can see this on the results page here. I’ve pieced together the top-7 riders, along with the annulments at the bottom. Note in particular his wattages:
Now, I don’t see his name in any previous MyWhoosh Race Results that I can find for the Sunday Race Club. Nor does it say why exactly his results were annulled.
Thus, naturally, I reached out to MyWhoosh to find out (since they never responded again to the initial Facebook thread about Eddy Hoole). Here’s what they had to say:
“At MyWhoosh we are committed to ensuring fair racing is maintained. Every rider who enters MyWhoosh’s esports racing events is subject to the MyWhoosh Performance Verification Program.
After an internal investigation, the MyWhoosh Cycling Esports Race Commission has annulled Eddy Hoole’s participation from March 12th’s Sunday Race Club, and suspended him from partaking in any MyWhoosh races until further notice. Eddy Hoole has violated Clause 1.4.5.3 of the MyWhoosh ruleset for participating in a MyWhoosh esports race while serving a suspension from Cycling South Africa.”
Thus in this case, the disqualification was officially for participating in a race while being suspended by your national governing body. Which, is a much easier thing to disqualify someone for, then dealing with deciding if they cheated or not. Of course, given he couldn’t previously establish he could hit the power numbers Zwift disqualified him for, these new race numbers aren’t much different.
In any case, I now return you to your previously scheduled Tuesday. While neither Zwift or MyWhoosh is great at solving cheating for the masses, at least there’s one less cheater on both platforms. I can only imagine Eddy Hoole is now eyeing Rouvy, who just today announced a new competition that results in the winner getting an all-expense paid VIP trip to Span to watch the finale of the Vuelta.
With that – thanks for reading!
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