Review: Zwift’s Yorkshire Championship Board
(2019) It is that time of year: the road cycling season culminates with the UCI world championship, hosted this year by the town of Yorkshire, England. It is also closing in on that dreaded season in the northern hemisphere where outdoor views get traded for basement wall stares. Zwift, the virtual indoor riding platform, has been reliable with releasing a new board with a braggart attention to detail for the actual course.
Zwift has featured past world championship courses include USA’s Richmond, Virginia, course as well as Austria’s Innsbruck course. The Virginia course featured a prodigious amount of flat metropolitan riding with two significant climbs. Innsbruck featured an endless opening climb with a screaming downhill for the second half before entering the town, kermesse style. The courses of Doha (2016) and Bergen (2017) were not featured on the indoor cycling app.
Zwift has exhibited an extreme desire to recreate real-life scenarios in their application, perhaps in an attempt to distract the gamer (because the application is categorized as a game) from the monotonous rotations of indoor riding. Zwift continues with Yorkshire’s detail by featuring a mock-up of the 2019 world championship road course. The pedestrians lining the course still exhibit looped behaviors, but that is only noticeable when stopped on course. Excuse us while we looked for a nice spot to pull over and pull in for a pint before we realized we were in virtual reality world.
Every cyclist has that favorite style of course. Climbers went to work on the Innsbruck course and descended like meteors in an attempt to stay away. All-rounders go for Richmond for its hard flat segments, punchy climbs, and short sightlines to prevent being caught. Yorkshire is our kind of course: it has shallow climbs too floppy for climbers to pounce on and too steep for sprinters and break away specialists. Yorkshire has a steep descent on the clockwise direction to negate the slight uphill beyond.
Yorkshire continues with the official segments within the course. There is a climbing portion upon the entrance to town followed by a sprint segment at the top. Climbers will ignite their powder on the hill while sprinters bide time to the top. The technical sprint (in real life) could see climbers getting deluged as the field comes back together at the entrance to the town of Yorkshire proper.
After a couple of laps around the Zwift board one trait has become apparent. The first lap around Yorkshire was a bit ho-hum and we attributed it to the course. But the second couple of laps greatly improved, and it took us some time to figure out why: suddenly there were scores of riders on course making it an enjoyable riding experience to queue up in a pace line around the English countryside. With a racing series commencing every two hours on the Yorkshire course, expect to see a busy board as cyclists explore just how fast they can go compared to the pros. You’ll see us out there trying our hand too. But don’t be surprised to see a cyclist trying to gain access to the Zwift Draft House restaurant to brag about drastically exaggerated KOM times.
