ONE MAN'S OBSESSIVE CRUSADE TO Take Down Zwift Cheats

Indoor cycling and virtual racing are booming, and so are the ranks of digital dopers abusing the platforms.

- BILL DONAHUE

THERE WAS A BEAUTIFUL TRANSFORMATION, then sheer bliss, and then the abyss of despair.

In 2019, Luciano Pollastri, a human-resources specialist who grew up in France and now lives in Madrid, weighed 330 pounds. He was flying 200 days a year for his job, eating obsessively and working out only sporadically. That year, he got gastric bypass surgery then lost 150 pounds in seven months. Not long after that, amid the pandemic, he mounted a bicycle for the first time in decades. Then he joined Zwift, the world's most popular virtual-cycling platform. Its roughly 1 million subscribers sit on stationary bikes and travel through a virtual world called Watopia, climbing pixelated mountains and traversing simulated forests and plains as they compete and train. Soon he was pedaling with an almost maniacal hunger, often logging four or five Zwift sessions a day. "On the weekends," he says, "I was spending almost my entire day there."

Gregarious and effusive, 48-year-old Luciano found reprieve from the loneliness that hit so many of us during the pandemic. Chatting over a headset, his bike connected to a Wahoo Kickr V6 smart trainer while rolling through the virtual world displayed on his TV screen, he told his new Zwift friends of the fears he felt living near a hospital-hearing ambulance sirens 24-7-and he divulged the worries that gripped him, post-surgery. "Obesity is a disease," he says. Eating is a disease, and I was afraid I would fall back into it amid my anxiety over Covid."