OPINION
Why equal prize money was built in from the start at MyWhoosh and how the economics of virtual racing make it possible
By Matt Smithson, Director of Esports and Game Operations at MyWhoosh E
very Sunday, riders from the Champ Bullys Philippines women’s cycling team climb onto their bikes and race on MyWhoosh, led by multi-time Philippine National Champion
Jermyn Parado, to compete across Categories 2 to 4 in our Sunday Race Club, chasing results for themselves and the team. The racing finishes, their heart rates come down, and any prize money they secured goes into a shared pot. It helps pay for the team’s travel to races across Asia as well as accommodation, entry fees and equipment. Over the past few years, those earnings have helped Champ Bullys survive and grow, allowing their riders to go on and win national titles and achieve strong results internationally. As a former bike racer in my youth, this is the part of their story that stays with me. The money earned in Sunday Race Club is putting a rider on the start line of a physical race hundreds of miles away. We’re turning an opportunity that exists on a screen into one that might change the direction of a career. At MyWhoosh, we spend a great deal of time talking about
Kelsey Van Schoor racing 2024 UCI Cycling Esports World Championship
access, and Champ Bullys are some of the people who make that idea tangible. These women already have the talent and the commitment to race at a high level, but what they need is a practical way to cover the costs that stand between them and their next opportunity. This is why prize money has always been an important part of our platform. We never had a transition period or a target date for reaching parity - men and women
have received equal rewards in MyWhoosh competitions from the beginning. Asking our women’s field to wait until our platform reached an
undefined milestone would have built an imbalance into the competition before the first race had even started. And as we can see in other sports, once that imbalance becomes established, it can be difficult to change. Budgets develop around it, commercial incentives lock in inequality, and unequal rewards become just part of the furniture. We had the benefit of building a new competition model, so we chose to start where we believed the sport should already be. At the MyWhoosh Championships 2026, we split the $1 million prize fund equally between the men’s and women’s competitions and Sunday Race Club distributes approximately $300,000 each month on the same basis. SRC also has between 35 and 40% female participation each week. These are large numbers, and we are proud of them. But their meaning becomes much clearer at the individual or team level. For an emerging rider, a relatively modest prize can pay for a flight or replace a worn piece of equipment, which can be the difference between entering a race and watching it take place without you. We have an advantage, of course, because virtual racing
gives us greater freedom to make that choice given that it works differently from road racing. A physical race organiser has to create a temporary sporting venue across public roads. Permissions have to be secured, roads need to be closed, and significant safety operations have to be put in place. Teams, riders and equipment also need to reach the same location. Much of that work begins again when the next event moves
www.bikebiz.com September 2026 | 41
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