A few days before the UCI Cycling Esports World Championships, Zwift user Luciano Polastri explained on his Burner blog account how users can use Zwift's companion app to change their weight during races and gain a performance advantage, "The The Ultimate Undetectable Weight Cheat in Zwift"

Because of the sensationalist nature of this title, Zwift shadow-banned Luciano for 30 days without a plea to fix the bug.

Although many in the community considered this a knee-jerk reaction lacking in judgment given the release of an article pleading for the issue to be fixed, Zwift rescinded the shadowban 48 hours later.

Despite Zwift's best efforts in the areas of transparency and dual recordkeeping roles, weight doping seems to be an issue that will not go away for the indoor cycling platform.

Because the platforms are used almost exclusively at home, out of the reach of third-party oversight, the potential for cheating is always present, usually in the form of strategically manipulating data to improve performance. Broadly speaking, this data manipulation falls into three categories:

Hacks, in essence, rely on the use of a companion app. Users can change their weight in the app right at the start of a race to significantly improve their performance. If the weight is restored before the end of the race, it should theoretically be undetectable.

Not much more than that, and a big topic of discussion, but this is an issue that was raised over two years ago on Zwift's ZwiftPower forum (which Zwift has refuted.) Now that Zwift racing has reached the UCI level, closing this rather large loophole Some might argue that not doing so would be a rather glaring oversight, if in fact it was highlighted so long ago.

After a blog post outlining the hack and finally asking Zwift to fix it, Luciano was notified that his account would be suspended for 30 days, and despite his request for a fix, publicly highlighting the problem violated Zwift's terms of service and "prevented other users from enjoying our platform to the . that may 'interfere, disrupt, adversely affect, or inhibit the full enjoyment of our platform.'"

While I think the majority of us have the utmost sympathy for Pollastri, it is not a huge stretch to see things from Zwift's perspective. The platform came across a user who published a blog post with a sensational title. Perhaps they should have read the entire article, but for the platform's more malicious users, they also provided a detailed explanation on how to cheat before asking Zwift for a solution.

Perhaps the ban would have gone relatively unnoticed had it not been a few days before the Cycling eSports World Championships. However, the Zwift community was outraged that a whistleblower was penalized, causing such a stir that Zwift CEO Eric Min issued the following statement:

It remains unclear how the bug will be detected, and perhaps how to avoid detection Perhaps to avoid public disclosure of cheaters who try to circumvent the detection method. Ideally, it should be some sort of live detection, not a post-hoc investigation by ZADA and ZwiftPower. In a perfect world, and given the publicity about the issue, Zwift would work to close loopholes altogether, rather than targeting users who exploit them.