The popular exercise app Strava has been forced to step in after amateur athletes were caught cheating to climb up its internal leaderboards — with some users recording rides taken on an e-bike as a pedal bike.
The app, which is used to record runs, cycles and other exercises, said it had removed more than 3.5 million activities from its database it judged to be suspicious.
The fitness app used by about 180 million people said that, as well as users from across the world recording rides taken on an e-bike as a pedal bike, others were posting runs that had been completed by bike or car.
It removed more than two million e-bike rides recorded as pedal bikes and more than 1.5 million activities recorded as bike or runs when they in fact took place in a vehicle.
The cheating meant athletes were able to achieve high places on the internal leaderboards for a specific stretch of road, known in the app as a segment.
Although coming high on a leaderboard grants no physical prizes, athletes can earn a virtual trophy for a top ten finish or, if top, will be crowned “King or Queen of the Mountain” (KOM).
Most significantly, however, whenever any other athlete completes the same segment, the profile of whoever is towards the top leaderboard is visible, potentially earning them extra “kudos” — similar to a “like” on Facebook.
• Editor at Runner’s World accused of posting false marathon time
Tom Davidson, senior reporter at Cycling Weekly, said a trophy or mountain award can give credibility to an amateur cyclist despite there being no monetary gain.
“For a lot of people, it’s the best title they can go for,” he said. “I have one KOM in all my years of riding. It’s a tiny hill near my dad’s house and it’s sacred to me. I was never a racing cyclist; it’s the only title or crown I’ve won as a cyclist and it feels special.
“When you have a KOM you live in a dread that someone will beat it and you get a notification on your phone that someone has taken it away from you.”
For many this means going beyond what is deemed acceptable in order to achieve it.
• Over the hill e-bikers cheat their way to top
It is not known how many of the removed rides were completed in the UK. The Times has contacted Strava for further information.
In an update on its official Reddit page, an engineer from Strava, called James, said the app had returned almost 300,000 athletes to the top ten on segments.
“Over the past few weeks, we reprocessed the top 100 activities on each of all ride segment leaderboards to address long-standing issues with anomalous activities showing up in results,” he said. “This wasn’t a small tweak — it was a full global backfill aimed at problems many of you have been pointing out.”
Strava allows runners and cyclists to be crowned “King or Queen of the Mountain”
GETTY
He added that, because of the bad behaviour of some athletes, Strava has now brought in “enhanced e-bike detection” that is “trained to catch activities recorded on an e-bike but uploaded as normal rides”.
It also has a new model that he said will “better identify when an activity uploaded as a run is actually a bike ride, so cyclists don’t disrupt run leaderboards”.
This, he said, will be done by AI software which will examine 57 signals such as heart rate or power levels to determine anything suspicious. “We hope this update clears up many of those concerns and puts us on better footing going forward,” James added.
Users can also report an activity themselves if they believe it to be false, including a specific complaint which says “activity was in a vehicle”.
The Times has previously reported that The Royal Parks had asked Strava to remove the Outer Circle of Regent’s Park as a “segment” to discourage cyclists from trying to break the speed records.
Strava was contacted for comment.