{"id":407667,"date":"2026-02-04T16:27:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-04T16:27:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/407667\/"},"modified":"2026-02-04T16:27:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T16:27:09","slug":"strava-removes-2-3-million-rides-from-leaderboards-in-clampdown-on-cheats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/407667\/","title":{"rendered":"Strava removes 2.3 million rides from leaderboards in clampdown on cheats"},"content":{"rendered":"

Exercise sharing app Strava<\/a> has removed more than two million rides suspected to have been done on e-bikes<\/a>, but logged as \u2018normal\u2019, from its leaderboards.<\/p>\n

The move comes as part of a wider initiative to clamp down on cheats<\/a> and \u201cunrealistic\u201d performances. Strava announced last year that it was using AI and machine learning<\/a> tools to analyse activities and ensure integrity on its platform, which awards KOM and QOM titles to users with the fastest segment times.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In a new update, shared directly to Reddit<\/a>, Strava revealed it had removed 2.3 million e-bike activities and 1.6 million activities suspected to have happened in vehicles from its leaderboards.<\/p>\n

You may like<\/p>\n

\u201cOver 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,\u201d a Strava engineer named James wrote.<\/p>\n

Within the work, the platform carried out what it calls \u201cenhanced e-bike detection\u201d, which involves a machine learning model \u201ctrained to catch activities recorded on an e-bike but uploaded as normal rides\u201d.<\/p>\n

Strava says it has since restored 293,000 users to their \u201crightful spot\u201d in leaderboard top 10s.<\/p>\n

In May last year, Strava announced that it had wiped 4.45 million activities from its leaderboards<\/a> in its hunt against cheats<\/a>. The company said at the time the deleted activities had been uploaded with the \u201cwrong sport type\u201d or \u201crecorded in vehicles\u201d.<\/p>\n

The latest race content, interviews, features, reviews and expert buying guides, direct to your inbox!<\/p>\n

Strava\u2019s rules specifically state that users should not upload public \u2018ride\u2019 activities, which appear on leaderboards, if they include data recorded in a car or motorcycle, using an e-bike, or pacing a vehicle.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s machine learning model, which it has been using for over a year, takes into account \u201c57 factors\u201d when analysing activities. In a previous Reddit post, Strava revealed more details about the system, saying it \u201clooks at every activity holistically and uses dozens of different features like acceleration, variance of speed, uphill average speed, and others.\u201d<\/p>\n

Strava has stressed that its leaderboard analysis is continuous and \u201cnever really \u2018done\u2019\u201d \u2013 \u201cwe know there\u2019s still more to improve when it comes to removing anomalous activities,\u201d engineer James wrote on Reddit.<\/p>\n

Users are encouraged to flag activities within the app if they believe the performance is not credible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Exercise sharing app Strava has removed more than two million rides suspected to have been done on e-bikes,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":407668,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-407667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-cycling","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=407667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407667\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/407668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=407667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=407667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=407667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}