The UCI has announced a three-year partnership with virtual training platform MyWhoosh. This three-year partnership isn’t just for the road cycling esports world championships; as of today, the partnership will include the 2028 UCI Road World Championships in Abu Dhabi.
This three-year partnership starts in 2024 and goes until 2026. Doing so makes MyWhoosh the exclusive virtual UCI Road World Championships training platform.
The announcement comes with MyWhoosh after they secured a three-year deal with the UCI for the Cycling Esports World Championships.
“We were impressed with what has been done in just four years of development,” said UCI President David Lappartient at a recent press conference. “The 300 or so people at MyWhoosh have offered consistent, fast improvements.”
“Esports is key to growing cycling,” continued Lappartient. “This is a good opportunity for the UCI and MyWhoosh to showcase our ability together. We’ll have some wonderful championships.”
“This is just the beginning,” says CEO and Managing Director of MyWhoosh Akhtar Said Hashmi.
“MyWhoosh users will be able to ride their very own UCI Road World Championships on the platform, while many professional racers will undoubtedly be testing themselves on the virtual courses ahead of the Zurich, Kigali and Montreal editions,” Hashmi said in a separate statement.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Abu Dhabi city consider this a win not just for MyWhoosh but for the emirate as a whole.
“We started the UAE tour in 2018, and in a month will have the sixth year,” continued Abu Dhabi Sports Council Chairman H.H. Sheikh Nahyan bin Zayed Al Nahyan. “We continue to grow our community ties to cycling too, with more than 50 races for the community per year. Our ambition is to have even more to ensure our people can be healthy and have fun.”
What is MyWhoosh?
MyWhoosh is a virtual cycling platform in a similar vein to Zwift, Rouvy, and others. There, riders can ride in several worlds, train, and partake in a catalog of workouts.
First released roughly four years ago, MyWhoosh has seen many improvements, both to graphics, racing physics, and feature set. As a result, the Sunday Race Club (SRC) has developed a cult following for its high levels of competition and the biggest prize purse in esports cycling. Payout is equal between men and women, and all four categories have prize money on offer.
The app is largely supported by the UAE as a way to encourage their people to live an active lifestyle, giving the app a bit of a unique flavor. MyWhoosh has stages in places like AlUla and South America rather than the traditional European maps found elsewhere.
Most interesting of all of this is that MyWhoosh is free to download and use. It’s a novel concept in 2024, but the company promises that it will continue to be free-to-use “for the foreseeable future.”
