Assigning Wrong Activity Type To A Ride
I could talk a lot how people cheat on Strava, for instance:
- Riding in a vehicle and recording a ride (especially E-Bike Ride)
- Pretending to be a female while being male
- Assigning traditional pedal Rides to E-Bike Ride for a better place on Strava Segments
- And more
Strava nowadays can detect and warn users with its own AI. Any user can flag a suspicious ride, and Strava accepts the report immediately.
The most sad way of cheating (which often is unintentional and results from ignorance) is:
- Assigning an E-Bike Ride to a traditional Ride activity.
Activity types have been introduced to clearly separate different cycling disciplines such as Ride (either road or general cycling) from MTB from E-Bike from e-MTB from Gravel cycling and so on.
It is forgivable if an e-biker assigns their activities to Ride just because of ignorance. It is a different thing if the rider is aware what they are doing but intentionally cheats as to the Activity Type. A recent example:
This girl rode in a gravel e-bike race on a classic Winora e-bike with a 750 Wh battery and a Bosch CX motor.
She definitely won the Female category in eSprint; no one is denying that.
Yet she assigns all her e-bike rides to Gravel Ride (traditional) category. I sent her a polite message on Strava asking her she might correct the Activity Type so she would qualify to Strava E-Bike Segments and be fair to traditional cyclist. Do you know what she did?
She banned me on Strava. I cannot understand it. Is she ashamed to ride e-bike and pretends to friends and followers she is a traditional gravel cyclist? But she won an
electric race! I'll never understand it. (Other riders flagged her ride though).
By contrast, I informed the second best rider on Male eSprint (The Man With A Disability) he could re-assign his ride to E-Bike Ride. He gladly did it and won the Course Record!
