Strava, the popular exercise tracking app, has deleted millions of recordings after it found users had been cheating to rank highly on its leaderboards.
Some cyclists using the app were caught using e-bikes instead of push bikes to finish rides quickly and to score high.
Others were found to have uploaded activities as running workouts that were in fact completed while riding a car or bicycle.
The company said it deleted more than 3.5 million activities it flagged as irregular.
Of those, over two million were e-bike trips misclassified as pedal-powered rides, while more than 1.5 million entries involved runs or rides that actually took place in vehicles.
Strava, which has roughly 180 million users worldwide, acknowledged that these practices allowed participants to unfairly climb rankings on specific stretches of road or trail, known as segments within the app.
Tom Davidson, a senior reporter at Cycling Weekly, told The Times these virtual accolades can hold real significance for amateur cyclists.
‘For many riders, it’s the highest honour they’ll ever achieve,’ he said
He added: ‘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.’
While leaderboard positions offer no tangible rewards, users can earn digital badges for finishing in the top ten. The top-ranked athlete on a segment receives the title ‘King or Queen of the Mountain’.
Leaderboard leaders also gain increased visibility, as their profiles appear whenever other users complete the same segment, often resulting in additional ‘kudos’, Strava’s equivalent of social media likes.
In a post on Strava’s official Reddit forum, an engineer identified as James said the company had restored nearly 300,000 athletes to top-ten positions after reprocessing leaderboard data.
He explained that the platform reviewed the top 100 activities on every ride segment worldwide to correct long-standing anomalies.
James said Strava has now introduced improved e-bike detection technology designed to identify rides improperly uploaded as standard cycling activities.
A separate system has also been implemented to better determine when a workout logged as a run was actually completed on a bike.
Both measures rely on AI tools that analyse dozens of data points, including heart rate and power output, to flag suspicious entries.
James said the update should significantly improve leaderboard accuracy going forward.
Users are also able to manually report questionable activities, including those suspected of being completed in a vehicle.
E-bike rides are by no means excluded from Strava, with the app’s selection including an option for electric bicycles.
However, to log the exercise correctly, the e-bike option has to be chosen from the menu.
Metro contacted Strava for a comment.
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