Strava has carried out a large-scale cleanup of its segment leaderboards, removing activities that were incorrectly recorded or uploaded under the wrong ride type. Strava has described the main issues as rides recorded on e-bikes but uploaded as standard rides, activities recorded in vehicles that ended up on cycling leaderboards, and activities uploaded under the wrong sport type.

In a post on the r/Strava subreddit, a Strava engineer said Strava reprocessed the top 100 activities on every global ride segment leaderboard using new machine learning models. The work targeted three areas:

1. Enhanced E-Bike Detection: They have introduced a new Machine Learning (ML) model, trained to catch activities recorded on an e-bike but uploaded as normal rides.
2. Leaderboard Cleanup: They have  reprocessed the top 100 activities on every global ride segment leaderboard to help ensure they are as free from vehicles, incorrect sport types, and e-bikes as possible.
3. Reduced Run Leaderboard Disruption: They have  released a model to better identify when an activity uploaded as a run is actually a bike ride, so cyclists don’t disrupt run leaderboards.

Strava said this resulted in 2.3 million e-bike activities being removed from ride segment leaderboards, 1.6 million vehicle activities being removed, and 293,000 athletes being restored to top-10 positions. Strava has also said e-bike rides are not being removed from the platform, but misclassified e-bike activities are being removed from standard ride leaderboards so they appear only on e-bike leaderboards instead.

What we don’t know

• Strava has not published a breakdown showing how many of these removals relate specifically to MTB segments versus road segments.

MTB and eMTB discussion

If you ride MTB segments on Strava, has anything changed on your local leaderboards since this cleanup? If you ride eMTB, are your rides consistently landing on e-bike leaderboards now, and have you seen any activities moved or corrected? Let us know your thoughts.