Matthew Smithson is Director Esports & Game Operations at MyWhoosh. In an interview with TOUR, he reveals how many millions of US dollars the platform pays out for e-cycling races and gives an insight into the winners and the future of the platform.
TOUR: Last year, prize money of around one million US dollars was distributed at the MyWhoosh Championship. Will that be repeated?
Smithson: Yes, we want to make the MyWhoosh Championship an annual event. We will definitely organise it again in 2026. We have our Sunday Race Club, which is of course also our weekly e-sports event. But the MyWhoosh Championship was designed to first give the participants a challenge to overcome and then use the prize money to increase the reach in the cycling community and in the media. And we have succeeded in doing that. And it's also important for us to demonstrate our product capabilities. By offering prize money, we guarantee that the game will be stable. That the results will be correct, that you can do it anywhere in the world in your garage, that we have checked all our drivers, that our categorisation is correct.
TOUR: How much prize money was awarded by MyWhoosh in 2025?
SmithsonApproximately 6 million dollars.
Full-time job Esports on MyWhoosh
TOUR: Are there any athletes who can make a living from it?
Smithson: Yes, some of the pros earn 150,000, 200,000 US dollars a year racing on MyWhoosh. That's their full-time job and it's well documented. What we don't document well is a lot of the people who race in categories 3, 4 and 5 around the world. I'll take the Philippines for example - we have a very strong following there. I know that there is a women's team in the Philippines that races most of the time in categories 3 and 4. They pool their money from their prize money and race road races in their team, which is basically funded by the Sunday Race Club. We have a lot of stories where people have said, 'I bought a new car by racing on my street. I've taken my family on holiday.' And we're not talking about professional athletes here. There are a lot of people out there making $1000 a month and these are average cyclists. They're categorised, they're racing against people at the same level. They race a sprint, they get a fifth place, that's maybe a few hundred dollars for them. A few hundred US dollars a year, that's a holiday, that's instalments for a car. We pay out up to 10th place, the teams get paid up to 7th place. Every month 30 people in each category get prize money, at least 30 people. So, yes, we have hundreds of stories of people who have won prize money.
TOUR: But I guess with the higher prize money also came the discussion that people said: I don't trust the other rider who was faster than me ...
Smithson: Not anymore. In my opinion, one of the most important achievements is the development of the verification system that we have set up at . Quite simply, I can basically tell if it's you based on your pedalling dynamics. I know your heart rate in relation to your power output. I know your recovery rates. I know your estimated performance, whether you are super fit or not. I know your weight. I know everything about you, from our Power Passport test that you have to do to be able to take part in the race, to the verification at the end of the race. We have primary and secondary power comparisons, we measure the deviations of these devices. I think we have 26 tests in our verification so far, and we are 99.9 per cent sure of that. That confirms, if you pass those tests, that the data was correct. And if you don't pass these tests, you are excluded from the race.
Tips for beginners on MyWhoosh
TOUR: What tips do you give newcomers to e-racing?
Smithson: The most important advice I give everyone: Learn how the game works. MyWhoosh is very different from others: The slipstreaming is different, the dynamics are different, the position you have to take in the group is different. So firstly: familiarise yourself with the game, ride, practice. And go out and have fun. Get involved in the community, socialise with the people who race with us, interact with our race management team. And it's a great atmosphere. Once you start at Sunday Race Club, Sunday Race Club becomes the centre of your life.
TOUR: MyWhoosh is a free platform and awards lots of prize money. Why?
Matt Smithson: We believe that e-sport is a very important part of the future of cycling. It is a discipline in its own right. For this reason, we are investing not just for the moment, but for the future. Road racing is expensive: You have to have roads closed, you have to organise a race course, it's difficult. We believe that the change in the future will primarily be towards, let's call it, racing on a social level. We will certainly move more towards an e-sport scenario, and this e-sport should not only be reserved for the elite. In traditional cycling, you do your club races during the week and there are categories 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on. And in these races there is prize money, at least in Australia there is. We have simply adopted this methodology and transferred it to a global level. But at the same time, we want to provide prize money, from beginner to elite, to make this a profession. So our main goal is to establish e-sports away from a niche sport to a kind of global cycling discipline in its own right.
Prize money as marketing
TOUR: I'm sure it's also about marketing?
Smithson: When we came onto the market, the market was heavily focussed on one platform. But the area they hadn't covered so well was the e-sports aspect. There were a lot of question marks. We were faced with the question: How can we draw attention to ourselves from a marketing perspective? And so we decided that e-sports should be our entry point. So we approached it a little differently than many other platforms. They probably built a community first and then channelled it into racing, whereas we started with e-sports and built that community. And if you look at us, at least in the early years of our company, we didn't really do any marketing at all. That was our marketing tool. So the word spread: 'Oh, there's this new platform that offers paid racing', and that's how we started to grow. And it wasn't until 2025 that we really made major investments in normal media spend to grow our platform because we were pushing that hard. On getting noticed in e-sports. A lot of people found out about us through that, and then we prioritised the community aspect, and now we've evolved to the point where our platform is huge.
TOUR: Do you have plans for the future to reduce the prize money?
Smithson: At the moment, we are committed to e-sports in the short to medium term. There is no doubt about that. We would like to continue our involvement with the UCI. This is currently in progress. We will continue to tighten up our verification and categorisation system. But we certainly have no plans to withdraw from prize money racing.
Kristian Bauer
Editor
