Yesterday, the finals of the 2024 UCI Cycling Esports World Championships were held in the United Arab Emirates, and the winners have been crowned.
The livestreamed event, hosted at the ADNEC Marina Hall 2 venue in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, was the culmination of a season of competition on MyWhoosh, one of the most popular indoor cycling apps on the market.
Participants came from National Selections and Open Public Qualifiers, followed by Semi-Final rounds over several months.
Across over six hours of competition, we saw winners emerge for both the men’s and women’s categories.
The men’s finals were won by Jason Osborne from Germany, with a combined score of 177, followed by Lionel Vujasin from Belgium (174 points), while Kasper Borremans from Finland was third with 164 points.
The finals for women were equally close, with Kate McCarthy from New Zealand taking the top spot with 180 points, Gabriela Guerra from Brazil following with 176 points, and Kathrin Fuhrer from Switzerland ranking third with 165 points.
The competition was based on three stages with a different focus. The first was a 300-meter sprint over a 1.6 km circuit.
The second was a strategy-based competition on a 9 km circuit featuring a 1.5 km climb. The third was an “all out” endurance competition over 4 laps on a 4 km criterium circuit.
The final scores were the sum of all the points won over all three stages. You can watch the full recording of the finals on demand below.
Indoor cycling is a rather unique form of esports, as it combines real physical challenges with simulation. Competitors use an app to simulate cycling on virtual circuits, but they actually cycle on the spot on real sports bikes that drive the data elaborated by the app and turned into performance.
It’s certainly a great example of how simulation can mix with the world of esports and sports in general.
MyWhoosh is a platform developed in the United Arab Emirates and it’s available for iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, and Apple TV.
In other esports news, the FIA is seeking partners among racing simulation developers to develop a racing platform for the upcoming 2025 Olympic Esport Games which will be held in Saudi Arabia.
