So, Garrett, you were recently a witness to an exciting bicycle race. Yes, so picture this Eight cyclists in sleek, colorful spandex Some are warming up, dialed in with headphones, shutting out the noise around them. Some are conferring in low whispers with their coaches. As the start approaches, they settle into their seats and clip into their pedals, and then the gun goes off and the cyclists start peddling furiously. Spectators are cheering, but the riders aren't going anywhere because
they're on stationary bikes. This race is being held on Swift, which is somewhere between a video game and a home workout system. So I'm here in Soho in New York City at the Swift Super League event. We have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight riders live on stage. You can kind of hear them in the background there. And this is you at
a recent Swift competition. Was it like while we were in a whitewash room in a basement in the Lower East Side of Manhattan with about a hundred other people packed in a few journalists, tech investors, and a bunch of cycling enthusiasts up on a big screen is the virtual course. It's kind of funny because the course they're racing on is actually set in New York, or a very futuristic version of New York, a bunch of skyscrapers that don't exist right now, and elevated glass highways, but
still doing a couple of loops through Central Park. So in a world of peloton success and the ubiquity of soul cycle studios, I guess nothing should surprise us. But it is a little odd to think of spectators gathering to watch racers cycle on their stationary bikes. Of course, a lot of people used to think the idea of watching anyone play video games what's crazy. I think the comparison to video games and e sports is a really
apt one. You know, E sports tournaments now fill huge stadiums, They get broadcast on ESPN, players signed multimillion dollars sership contracts. Now Swift is still very niche, but one day it thinks it's stationary cycling competitions will become so popular that people will pay to watch them. This week, Garrett explores
the curious world of Swift. Not only does he spend an afternoon in a sweaty room watching racers furiously pedaled in nowhere, but he spends a month trialing the technology himself. By fusing video games with exercise, Swift is pushing the limits of what the sport of cycling could actually be. I'm Brad Stone and I'm Garrett VNC and you're listening to Decryptive. Oh it's February twenty two and I'm going to set up Swift on my bike so I can train inside my apartment and never have to go outside.
I'm based in New York, which is pretty cold the winters, so I decided to use with to get rid of bad weather as an excuse not to train. That's how most people use WITH. They sign up for a fifteen dollar a month subscription and train at home. First things first, we're gonna put the bike onto the trainer. I had to go to the bike store and get a very fancy axle to fit my bike and fit the trainer
without damaging the bike. So again, and Garrett, I think you need to walk us through this strange pastime some more so you're doing this in the middle of your living room exactly. Well, I mean, so first, I have to have a bike, which I already had a normal bike you can use outside. I hooked it up to something called a trainer. Essentially, it's this heavy metal roller that attaches to the back wheel. It puts friction on that wheel, kind of simulating the resistance that you'd usually
get from the road. Okay, I think I've set it up here where it's nice and tight, But you know, the last thing I want to do is bend my carbon fiber frame here, which again, once I had attached a trainer, I added a speed sensor. It's this little sensor about the size of a coin. It measures how fast your wheel is spinning, so it can transfer that into the game. But there's nothing that's new about these devices that turn your bike into a stationary bike. Right,
You're right. Cycles have been training indoors for years. The racing crowds with the difference the races they've come to watch. All assot that gets you nowhere. The excitement mounts of the first item is announced. This clip is from the nineteen forties, covering something called roller racing, where the bike is mounted on top of a series of rollers. Today, the more common design is to fix your rear wheel to a single roller, but it's pretty much the same idea.
Cycling has been a big sport in Europe for some time, and now it's growing in popularity in the US as well, and it's more people get into competitive cycling. Training indoors
has become a bigger part of the sport. Okay, so we're Swift come from essentially a couple of startup guys, John Mayfield and Eric men They got board of staring at the wall while training at home on their own bikes, so they got together and started building up video games so they could watch their avatars racing on a computer or TV screen while they biked. That's what became Swift. The faster you bike in real life, the faster avatar goes.
It's got this social component too. You can see other people doing laps around you, all right, Actually, you can see how hard the other riders are pushing, where they're from their stats getting passes, and feel too good. I mean, the people around me, they're not like not being past like crazy again, I feel like I'm in a pretty average space here. Someone just saying p wreck zoom passed me kind of plan differently that, but I'm riding with a few other people just passed the Brazilian So once
you started training, what was it like? It can get pretty intense. You don't have any of the distractions of being outside. It's just you and the bike, so you can push yourself pretty hard. The roots are all pretty impressive. They're trying to give you something to look at, so you're cycling up these beautiful mountains, through coastal towns, even in underwater tunnels. So normal cycling, I think, has a bit of a reputation of being expensive, but this virtual
version doesn't seem cheap either. Just to get started, you needed a bike plus all the accessories that you talked about. It's definitely not a cheap hobby, is it right. I already had the bike, so I didn't have to pay for that, but I had to get a trainer, which I got second hand for about fifty bucks, and a speed sensor which set me back another sixty although if I wanted to, I could have pushed all of that to more than a thousand dollars if I wanted to
get one of the fancier setups. And that's not counting for all the stuff that you know you want to buy. Once you start biking and in the future, they could do a lot of in game content, such as, you know, buying special jerseys or special bikes to show off in the game. So, in other words, just like kids are spending hundreds of dollars to look cool in video games like Fortnite, grown adults could be doing the same thing
to show off in front of their virtual training partners. Yep, that in game content is a huge potential revenue stream. So what are some of the other ways that Swift makes money from this? So there's the monthly subscription we talked about, that's fifteen bucks a month. Then there's the money they could make if they put up billboards within the game itself. They're not really doing that yet, but I did talk to the CEO and he says it's in the works. Cyclists are generally a pretty wealthy group
of people, so advertisers want to reach them. It doesn't sound like a bad business. Investors have already poured quite a bit of money into the company. Swift recently raised million dollars, valuing the company at around six hundred million, and the company says more than a million people have tried it out. At peak times, ten thousand riders are
on the Swift universe at the same time. And we should say fitness startups are hot right now, like Peloton, which sells a two dollar stationary bike and then churches you another forty dollars a month to stream exercise classes. And Peloton is aiming to go public this year at a potential valuation of eight billion dollars. But when Swift went to raise money, they didn't just pitch themselves as
an exercise company or a fitness startup. They wanted to be part of the one billion dollar and growing esports industry as well. And that's where these big competitions come in the kind that we heard about at the start of the show. Yeah, the league started popping up as soon as people started raising each other on the platform, But now Swift is trying to professionalize it, bringing those leagues into its system and turn that into another source
of revenue. More on that after the break. To learn more about the Swift competitions, I decided to actually attend one myself in New York City, the one we heard at the start. I wanted to match my quirky homeworkout experience with this big picture potential for Swift to be a cultural phenomena on Garrett, I'm really hoping you were one of the eight cyclists up on stage. I definitely
was not. I am not that fast. These guys are all people who are either current professionals or you know, almost made it into the pros and sort of working the way back up into it through Swift. We had the real life racers, but they were also about fifty cyclists beaming in virtually from around the world. There was this big screen showing the virtual racers. The crowd didn't really seem to know where they should be watching, whether the big screen or the guys actually sweating it out
in front of them. I'm kind of imagining these big colosseums that usually find in Asia where people gathered to watch a League of Legends or StarCraft. So was it a little bit like that. Yeah, it kind of felt like that. It felt maybe sort of as the version one point oh of what that could be or what it could look like. I talked to one of the racers. His name is Adam Zimmerman. He's been making waves and
Swift lately. So last year he won this race among all the top American amateur Swift users, which got him a spot in this rand new pro league tell us more about that. Well, it began this year and it has real pro teams from Europe competing in it, so you know they're serious. Adams a really good cyclist. He tried to actually go professional as a road cyclist but never quite made it, so Swift is a bit of
a second chance for him. He was at the race I went to and he said he thinks Swift is building mass appeal for spectators as well as regular users like me. The best analogy I can make is online dating. When when it first started becoming popular in the early two thousands, uh, it wasn't socially acceptable for for people to meet online, and now over time people have gotten used to that and now it's not a big deal. He also explained why as an athlete you might actually
want to compete in it. If they did give me a pro contract to raise the sports, I would do that because of the easy convenience. I can travel to an event like this, but for the most part, I can raise out of my living room, spend time with my wife and my pops, and have my family around and not have to live out of a suitcase like um in real life. Professionals. So Swift, let's Adam be a professional athlete as well as a guy who works
from home exactly. Swift is betting that if high profile cyclists start competing like people who are professional athletes who already compete in the big traditional road races, it will pull regular people like me to pay fifteen dollars a month to subscribe and use it at home. Kind of, if it's good enough for them, it's got to be good for me. I would imagine though that the cycling
traditionalists may look at this a little bit skeptically. Has Swift actually been able to attract high profile cyclists, I mean they have pulled in some of those professional teams
from Europe. These aren't necessarily names that you know a regular person who only knows three or four cyclists in the world would know, but they are real professional cyclists and kind of surprisingly, some cyclists might even be able to make more money racing on Swift then in some of the most prestigious real life cycling races, especially women. For example, Swift held a tournament last year at the same time as a Tour of Flanders, which is one
of the big road cycling races in Europe. The woman who won this WIF trace made seven thousand, eight hundred dollars, while the real world professional just took home four d I have so many questions about this, Garrett. So it was, first of all, where where does the prize money come from? Some of the league's you know, offer sponsorships. Swift right
now puts up the money for itself. But you could obviously see any kind of thing that works in real world sports working here and Swift as you've described that, they're simulating these these incredible race courses with hills and mountains and tunnels. So how are how are they simulating the climbs? So the actual trainer, that that piece of machinery that you hook your bike into, it can communicate with the software and what it will do is when it senses you're about to go up a big hill,
it will add resistance. So it just becomes a lot harder to actually get the same power out of your bike. How are the cyclists comparing the simulated experience to the real thing. Of course, it's it's different, And you know, I had some interesting conversations with some of them because in a in a real world race, there is a certain element of technical skill. You know, how fast can you go down a hill without flying off the road? Can you dodge around some of your competitors without falling
over or knocking one of them over? So, of course this is very different. But when you look at the way the technology is developing, some of the trainers are actually starting to you know, move around, you know, simulate inclines by actually pushing the front of the bike up.
And some of the conversations I was having just casually when I was at this event, people were sort of speculating about what the future could look like and maybe at some point, you know, you'll have VR a R some kind of special suit that makes it actually feel like you're on a real bike might become indistinguishable from actually being outside. So what are the old school cyclists think about this? Are they are they excited about what
it means for the sport. I mean, opinions are pretty split when it comes to this, but there are some people in the sport who think that it needs a bit of a reset. I chatted with christ And Armstrong, who's won cycling gold medals for the US at three different Olympics. She's one of the most decorated US cyclists
in history. When you think about the sport like the Super Bowl, or you think about the gaming that's going on virtually and all the different fans and all of the views and all the eyes on that cycling doesn't
have it. If they don't have it, they have it at the tour in France, those numbers are gone down, and they definitely don't have it in the women's cycling, and so a lot of times the women cyclings inside show them in And I think one of the most important things is that it doesn't have a lot of money. It doesn't have the viewership, doesn't have the TV time that a lot of the larger I call them balsmorees have in America, and so it's really hard to compete against that. And so I think that um the e
spore platform can really reset that. Like Christen said, cycling isn't particularly lucrative from most athletes, whereas E sports is already a billion dollar business exactly. I also talked to Swift CEO Eric men at the race that I was at. Now he really believes that swift has the potential to become a real spectator sport, just like the sports it's it's no secret that it's very difficult to commercialize professional cycling, but you know, putting in on a new platform like this,
UM that is more tuned to the changing audience. UM, I think there's a real opportunity for us to commercialize it. Uh. Certainly, the cost that we're putting on a drift event is far cheaper for far more cost effective and closing down roads of major cities or so. I think there are lots of opportunities around selling tickets. Arena Garrett, you have a pretty finely tuned filter for startup spin. When you hear Eric men talk like this, UM, do you believe him?
He seemed pretty excited about it. He told me in vision stationary cycling becoming an Olympic sport sometime in the future. So, of course I'm skeptical that might be a bit of a stretch, but at the very least, he says cycling is ready for a serious shake up. I think of cycling sometimes it's like cricket. It is very difficult to
explain to someone what is actually going on. UM. So we need to experiment with formats where someone can just drop in and no exactly who's winning and who's not winning. So Eric is experimenting with new formats for races. Like a lot of traditional road cycling races in Europe are pretty long, they take place over many days and for the uninitiated it can be hard to follow. So was he changing any minds in the traditional cycling world. Well,
he definitely is when it comes to training. At least a few really high profile professional cyclists are singing the praises of Swift, like Matt Hayman. He is a serious legend who just retired from pro cycling. In he won the Perry Robe, which is one of the most important races in cycling. It's this brutal two one day race with some stretches on cobblestone roads. Now Matt won the race just six weeks after breaking his arm in a crash.
He trained on Swift because he wasn't supposed to be outside. Well, I used to be a traditionalist and I used to say our training wars, but you know, the last two two or three years, it's really changed my way. I mean there was a point there when my arm was actually healed and I told my coach, I'm actually getting more quality work done on being more effective time effective and efficient um and now being retired as the flip side.
You know, I've got a family, I've got I can't go out for four or five hours on my bike, so you know it's it. Um. You know, it really did change change that whole indoor training thing. And it used to just be a you know, a stop gap when when you couldn't find it, you couldn't get out because it was raining. And now it is actually not only are people racing on it, but it is a really a great way to train. But for now it will be going too far to say that the pro
cycling world is intimidated. For most people, Swift is still a training platform, not a race. So Garrett, how is your personal swift training going? It's been going okay, It's been pretty fun. I ordered a bunch of white towels so I can mop up the sweat from my floor and from my bike, which I didn't have to do before. I did run into one problem though, What was that My downstairs neighbor kept texting me asking what the noise was.
She thought there was an earthquake going on. That's that's funny. And how about is a spectator? I mean, I don't know about you, but I'll tune into the tour to friends every every now and then um. And one of the things that I like about it is the unpredictability, the crashes, the near misses, the incredible feats of endurance to play out over the course of weeks, and these
are things that Swift doesn't or can't replicate. I think it's very similar to the sports in this that when you watch an e sport going on and you don't actually know how to play the game or play the game yourself. For me at least, it's extremely boring. But once you've actually played that game, you know how challenging some of the things are that the players are pulling off.
You start to kind of get hooked. And so cycling is all about wattage, how much energy you can produce with your legs, how much power you can put out into the bike, And when you're watching a Swift race on your computer, you can see what all the athletes are producing and kind of compare it to what you you know, measly human are capable of doing, and it's pretty impressive to see what they can do. So if the Swift was to prove the viability of the sport
and the and the quiet, the skeptics. Do you think they'll have this course to themselves. I mean, what is the stop, say a Peloton from getting into this. That's a great question. I mean I think you probably see some people who get really fit on their Peloton bikes,
maybe jumping in and competing on swift. But what the market that they have really dialed into is that that kind of person who is into cycling, that that person who has their own bike, likes the right outside in the summer, maybe gets kind of nerdy about the Tour de France, and a lot of people who go on Peloton are just you know, they don't know much about cycling. They probably don't even have a bike that they want to ride outside. They just want to get fit. Do
you find yourself cycling outside less? I mean, the whole reason I wanted to try this out was so that I wouldn't have to cycle outside in the dead of winter. You know, sometimes it's just me being a baby and I don't want to be cold, and sometimes there's actually inches of snow in the park where I usually ride. But now that spring is coming, I'm finding myself being called to be outside again. So first big biking out of the season. I'm outside. I'm in Prose Park. Blossoms
are everywhere, people are biking, people are running. It's just great to be outside. I'm still getting past though. There's some fast guys out of here. And that's it for this week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. Have you tried swift or watched the sports? You can write to us at Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at G E R R I T D and I'm at Bradstone and please help us spread the word about our show by leaving us a rating or a review.
Where ever you'd like to listen to podcasts. This episode was produced by piore Coakari and Lindsay Cratterwell. Our story editor was Aki Ito. Thank you also to Ann Vandermay and Emily Abuso. Francesca Levi is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.