Huh. Okay.

Having a crank/pedal PM for verification makes a lot of sense. It takes away the ability to use an ebike, or other drivetrain augmentation.

I amazed how amateur many of the data manipulation attempts are; not even an attempt to put some randomization into the data.

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ECMGN Therapy Silicon Valley:
Depression, Neurocognitive problems, Dementias (Testing and Evaluation), Trauma and PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

While it's good to see they are cracking down a bit, I do wonder if it's wise to divulge how each person was caught. Like I would never have known that Zwift uses a specific nunber for their files vs Garmin. Now I do.

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Strava

DC Rainmaker has an informative post on this, too.
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/...lainer-of-sorts.html

Yeah, it's like here's the guidebook if you want to cheat...

i dont get your point: what if I use an e-bike and still measuring on the trainer? you think it would be fair?

I meant that having a crank/pedal PM as verification means people can’t cheat by using an ebike or hidden motor (if they did the power mismatch would be obvious).

Using an ebike is cheating, but with only the trainer power measurement it would be hard to detect.

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ECMGN Therapy Silicon Valley:
Depression, Neurocognitive problems, Dementias (Testing and Evaluation), Trauma and PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

Berger is in her teens, and angling for a spot on a Euro development team. Not exactly one with the know-how to believably manipulate data (apart from the fact her real-life results never came close to her Zwift results).

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ZONE3 - We Last Longer

"Duncombe and Berger are still permitted to use Zwift during their suspensions, and they both will be eligible to participate in competitions following their six-month suspensions."

Whew......

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Inside The Big Ring: Podcast & Coaching

How much longer will Zwift delay bringing in encryption? Ridiculous.

Maybe I'm missing something about how e-bikes work, but you could probably use an e-bike to get around double measurement too right? If one uses trainer power measurement and a powertap hub, one could pretty easily game it without manipulating anything I would think.

You're not allowed to use wheel-on trainers for this level of Zwift racing. So that excludes PowerTap hubs.

Ah, didn't know that, thanks. That, and only that of course, is why I'll never be a top zwift racer.

Zwift cheating is so interesting. The article says they were busted for not supplying a separate power data file. In other words, they were supposed to use both a smart trainer and a bike based power meter for the events. This is cause for the suspension because it is indirect evidence that they could have illegally increased their power on the smart trainer. I guess that is the only way to catch someone cheating on Zwift.

There are other ways but they're a lot of work so you'd only do that if you were focusing on a single suspect rider at a time. It's a real pain to do it for dozens or hundreds of riders.

Duncombe statement on VeloNews

That goes up there with the best (and by 'best' I mean 'worst) excuse statements of all time

Throws data file merging "friend" under bus. Inserts irrelevant paragraph on COVID and eating disorders.

And confirming what ZADA said - not a glimmer of remorse.

Sheesh.

Not an ounce of personal responsibility, all for semi-anonymity in a virtual bike race...

Just couldnt take a (rightfully imposed) one race DQ, so she decided to turn things from an honest mistake (punished by the DQ) to full on data forgery.

On the bright side for her, she’s not anonymous anymore...

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ETA: I just saw the following list of requirements for competition in the Pro-Am races and noticed the following.



It's actually quite difficult for a lot of people to go somewhere with a climb averaging 5% for 20 minutes. I will need to drive 10 hours to Pittsburgh to get to a place with a climb like that. Certain countries don't have any climbs like that.

This also doesn't address a more immediate issue, which is that static calibration on both the PM and the trainer could be gamed. Comparable to the 50% HCT rule, which wasn't a full crack down on EPO and blood doping, quite a few of the rules listed above are of tangential relevance at best.

Much easier to require everyone to purchase certified weight plates (hey, Zwift could even make a buck here by having ZADA engraved into the plates), one 10 kg, one 20 kg. Make people do a video of them taking the mass of the plates on the scale they plan on using, then in the same video, have them do static calibration of the PM they plan on using. Have them submit the excel file with the various offset numbers recorded, and have them use that slope. That's what guarantees the accuracy of the PM. Now that the PM has been standardized (and I believe the slope is reported in the *.fit files), if the recording from the trainer doesn't match up, then there's an issue. Make people do this 3x a year. An added side benefit is that this also guarantees the accuracy of the scale used.

Otherwise, without addressing the more fundamental issue of people adjusting slope on the PM to match the wacky numbers from the trainer, it's all smoke and mirrors anyway. Yeah, some powermeters don't allow people to enter slopes. Well, if ZADA really want integrity of competition to be taken seriously, it should require that either the PM or the trainer to have slopes that can be calibrated (and require people to use data from that device as the primary feed when doing Zwift races).

As @ridenfish39 mentioned above, there are numerous A-grade Zwift racers who can't do what they do indoors when competing outside. I posted rants about this elsewhere, but someone who's a no name at GMSR (a climb-heavy amateur stage race) could apparently do 6.2 w/kg for 20 minutes on Zwift. Rather ludicrous, when our resident climber, who actually won the mountain top finish stage at GMSR and is an actual pro, has a 6.0 w/kg 20-min PB on Zwift, all the while being ~10 kg lighter.

Someone else (a former competitor of mine) who could apparently do 5.0 w/kg (325 W) for 20 minutes on Zwift either has a 0.29 m^2 CdA on the TT bike or uses a faulty PM/trainer when on Zwift.

Sure, go after the easy-picking targets such as Ms. Duncombe and Ms. Berger above, but one could easily do all that ZADA asks and still adulterate the integrity of competition, or one could skip at least step E mentioned above without compromising integrity of competition when people are forced to use PM/trainers with the correct slope.

What I don't get is why not release the email correspondence with ZADA? From her side, it sounds like that would make it more clear to the outside world.

Also, where did she think the rest of the ride data came from??? A magical watt fairy?

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Strava

Right. I get that not everyone is as computer/tech savvy as most here. But the key here is that the Garmin, apparently, ran out of battery early in the race and, somehow, the rider thought that a FIT file could be produced from the dead Garmin. Quoting from the Duncombe response here...

"After one of the qualifying races for the ProAm League I went to turn off my equipment and noticed my Garmin was dead. When I tried to upload the file I realised that the battery had died and wasn’t sure at which point it had stopped working. I had a file that looked like the warm up and it was the only thing I could find so I sent it to ZADA explaining what I thought had happened. Shortly after, a friend offered to help me retain the full race file and it seemed to work so I uploaded this to Zwiftpower."

Emphasis mine. How do you 'retain the full race file' from a device with no power? The key here is that she thought that a Garmin file could be produced from a dead device. It seems to me that even a less-that-super-tech-savvy person could understand that no power = off and that off = no recording.

The un-indicted co-conspirator should step forward and explain...

So bizarely I'm going to side with her on this.

She's got public strava profile and all other races she's done she sent the dual recordings and had no issues. She was very naive in trying to provide that second file for this race, but in the grand scheme of things? Meh, I'll cut her some slack.

That she sent the warmup file to me says she just assumed that uploading a file was all that was needed, and there was zero attempted to falsify that first one. After that then she was dumb, and with hindsight then clearly ended up in spiral.

But you know what, this year has been fecking hard on a lot of people and I know a lot of people that have done some dumb arse out of character stuff at some point.

Do I want to be part of some anonymous group hounding someone for being dumb, but something that hasn't caused harm to anyone but themselves? Now I thought long and hard about this part of this post, but a year ago there was a thread about the marathon investigations that had hundreds of posts. And then the subject killed himself. In this case I would prefer to err on the side of faith that it was a dumb arse move that spiralled.

That it's public is bad enough, she's going to have this coming up for years, and that is already disproportionate to the 'offence' to me. No need to make it worse from here.

I do get that the counter argument to this is that it's a pro event and in pro events then real world money exchanges hands. Careers are made and broken. And so there is a higher standard to be held. But again in this case there is no suggestion that she in any way attempted to gain advantage. She just forgot to charge her garmin and rather than blowing a series race tried to cover that minor oversight in a way that clearly wasn't going to fool anyone at all.

I agree that we should be aware of the tendency we can have to pile on condemnation of cheating and those who perpetrate it or are suspected of doing so. As you say, while the vast majority of us deplore cheating, especially when it has a tangible impact on others, it should be kept in perspective and we should bear in mind that when someones's already been punished and publicly shamed, we should perhaps stop kicking. It's easy to imagine everything is very black and white and paint everyone as good or evil, but that's not the reality. Let's take a step back.
I'm not siding with the accused here, but I don't see any need to add to the condemnation either. It's been dealt with, let's move on....

You make a good case. But it'd sure be nice if she'd just owned her mistake instead of making a long, convoluted set of arguments to make herself appear like the victim. Not just her, but almost everyone who gets caught cheating these days.

I don't know how we make a cultural shift towards taking personal responsibility in sport. I'm against excessive pile-ons. But also against accommodating this culture.