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In the ride segment https://www.strava.com/segments/35185845?filter=overall the first place is an indoor ride https://www.strava.com/activities/4587913987

How can such a thing be possible? From the look of the ride and its constant speed it really was indoor. Is that some glitch where a virtual ride was tagged wrongly?

There was a period of time when this was happening a few years ago.  I was seeing it with the Rouvy program.  I think that they built virtual routes from real GPS data and were applying that real GPS data to the files when people rode them, so it would show up as if it was ridden in real life when uploaded to 3rd party programs like Strava.  After a period of time, I think Strava got that fixed, probably by identifying some tag in the data file or having Rouvy add some virtual cycling tag.  I hadn't seen it from other programs before what you posted above, but it looks the same.  I would flag it as a GPS error and maybe submit it to Strava as a support ticket to look into.  If it was ridden on a virtual trainer, then it is not a legitimate segment attempt compared to the real life segment so should not count on the same leaderboard.  


I just looked a little more at that person specifically to see how those rides and segments were showing up.  It is interesting that none of the segments seem to be showing when you look at the activity itself, but his results from that activity show up in the leaderboard.  He has 2 pages of KOM's, apparently all from riding the virtual ap, but none of those rides show any segments when you open them up (at least in my view).  Looking at that virtual program, it looks like people can import any .gpx route they want and then it will let them ride it. It must be saving their ride with the same .gpx or .fit data when sending to Strava making it look like a legit ride.  Their most recent KOM was in 2022, so maybe Strava cut off that ability, but didn't resolve past files.  


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