Is e-FORT AI the Future of Cycling Performance? Inside the New AI Platform

WE DON’T NEED MORE CYCLING DATA. WE NEED INTELLIGENCE THAT UNDERSTANDS US.

What is e-FORT?

e-FORT is an AI-powered endurance platform that recalculates effective FTP daily using HRV, sleep, and historical training data to provide actionable cycling coaching and race strategy.

Discover e-FORT, the new AI endurance platform offering dynamic FTP tracking, XCO race strategy, and stage-race modeling for mountain bikers.

Cycling has spent years teaching technology to measure the athlete. The next step is making that technology understand the person behind the numbers.

There was a time when owning a power meter was enough to make you feel like you had entered the serious end of cycling. Then came GPS computers, smart trainers, training platforms, sleep trackers, HRV, recovery scores and increasingly sophisticated ways of measuring almost every aspect of a ride.

Today, the modern cyclist can collect an extraordinary amount of information. We know how many watts we produced, how long we spent in each zone, how our heart rate responded, how well we slept, how our recovery looks and how today’s ride compares with hundreds of rides before it.

Yet for all that information, there is still one question that can be surprisingly difficult to answer: what should I actually do today?

That is the question sitting at the heart of e-FORT, a new endurance performance platform launched this week with an ambitious proposition. Rather than becoming another destination for cyclists to upload rides and study graphs, e-FORT wants to sit between the athlete and the data, interpreting what is happening and helping turn it into a decision.

In other words, the company isn’t arguing that cyclists need more data. It is arguing that we need technology capable of understanding the data we already have.

And more importantly, understanding us.

The problem isn’t a lack of information

Cycling technology has become exceptionally good at measuring things. The problem is that the information often exists in isolation.

Your bike computer knows what happened during the ride. Your training platform knows what you have done over the past few weeks. Your watch may know how you slept. Another application might know your HRV. A race-planning tool knows the course.

The athlete is left somewhere in the middle, trying to join the dots.

That is the gap e-FORT is attempting to address.

The platform is built around a shared dataset rather than treating each ride as an isolated event. Its AI can draw on 365 days of training history, races and results, current fitness and fatigue, overnight HRV, resting heart rate, sleep, the athlete’s journal and life constraints, as well as the purpose and details of a completed or planned session.
That distinction matters because cyclists are not machines that produce identical outputs every day.

The same workout can be appropriate on Monday and completely wrong on Thursday. A rider who slept eight hours and is fresh is not the same athlete as the rider who slept five hours, travelled across the country and is carrying fatigue from a hard weekend.

The numbers might tell you that both riders are capable of producing the same power.

Context tells you whether they should.

That is where e-FORT believes the next generation of performance technology needs to operate.

Your FTP doesn’t wake up every morning feeling the same

FTP has become one of the most important numbers in cycling. We test it, put it into our head units and training platforms, and then build much of our training around it.

But the number is only useful if it reflects what the athlete is capable of doing.

Your physiology changes from day to day. Fatigue accumulates. Recovery varies. Sleep can be poor. Stress can rise. Training load changes. Sometimes you wake up feeling ready to attack the world; on other mornings, the same target power suddenly feels very different.

e-FORT attempts to account for that by recalculating an effective FTP each morning using overnight HRV, while incorporating fitness and fatigue modelling into its assessment of current capacity. Sleep and resting heart rate also form part of that wider picture.
It is a subtle but important shift in thinking.

Instead of treating FTP as a fixed identity, the system is trying to establish what the athlete is capable of right now.

For anyone who has ever started a prescribed session believing they were going to hit their numbers, only to discover within ten minutes that their body had other ideas, that is a much more useful question.

The important part isn’t the AI. It’s what the AI does with the information.

The cycling industry is going to hear the word “AI” a lot over the next few years. Simply adding an AI chatbot to an existing platform, however, doesn’t necessarily make the technology more useful.

e-FORT is attempting to go beyond conversation.

The system can assess the intention of a training session, compare that intention with what actually happened, create or adjust future sessions and write those changes into the athlete’s training plan, while retaining explicit approval with the athlete.

That changes the role of the technology.

A traditional training platform might tell you that you completed 82 percent of a workout or that your training load has increased.

Useful information, certainly.

But the more important question is what happens next.

Why did you miss the target? Was the workout poorly prescribed? Were you carrying fatigue? Did you execute the session incorrectly? Should tomorrow’s training change?

The ambition is to move from reporting what happened to helping decide what happens next.

That is the difference between having information and having intelligence.

What happens when the race course becomes part of the calculation?

For mountain bikers and gravel racers, the race-planning capabilities are arguably even more interesting.

One of e-FORT’s headline features allows an athlete to provide a race-profile image and have the system extract the elevation data, calculate a power distribution and produce a strategy that can be transferred to a compatible bike computer.

It is a simple concept with potentially significant implications.

A race organiser publishes the course profile. Instead of simply looking at the climbs and guessing where the hardest sections will be, the athlete can use that information as the starting point for a personalised strategy.

The Pro platform takes the idea further, with segment-by-segment power and speed optimisation, race-craft analysis, lap briefings and multi-day fatigue modelling for stage racing.

That last part is particularly relevant to South African mountain biking, where stage racing remains such an important part of the sport.

A seven-day race isn’t seven separate races.

What you do on day one changes what you have available on day five. A rider who spends too much energy early in the week may still produce a good result on the first stage, but arrive at the business end of the race with fewer matches left to burn.

e-FORT is designed to model that relationship and project an athlete’s likely capacity across subsequent stages.

That is where personalised intelligence becomes more than a buzzword.

The strategy isn’t simply based on the course.

It is based on you on that course.

Sometimes the fastest way to race faster is to waste less energy

This is perhaps the part of e-FORT’s proposition that will interest serious mountain bikers most.

Cycling has traditionally focused heavily on output. How much power can you produce? How high is your FTP? How long can you hold it?

But racing isn’t a laboratory.

A rider can produce an enormous amount of power and still make a poor tactical decision. An acceleration might gain ten seconds on the rider ahead, or it might simply burn energy because the terrain immediately changes.

e-FORT’s race-craft analysis attempts to distinguish between those efforts by analysing power in relation to the terrain and determining whether an effort actually produced a meaningful speed benefit.

The company gives a striking example in its launch material: eliminating 15 percent of wasted efforts during a 90-minute XCO race could potentially save around 45 seconds without the rider producing a single additional watt.

That changes the performance conversation.

The question isn’t always how much power you can produce.

Sometimes it is how intelligently you spend the power you already have.

For XCO, where races can be decided by seconds, that distinction could be enormous.

SRAM & Hammerhead Karoo Integration: Bringing e-FORT AI to Your Handlebars

The ambition doesn’t stop with training and physiology.

Through its collaboration with SRAM and Hammerhead, e-FORT is designed to interpret AXS and Flight Attendant information alongside terrain and rider physiology. That means factors such as suspension mode, gearing and rider-relative cadence can become part of the wider performance picture.

The planned e-FORT extension for Hammerhead Karoo takes this concept directly onto the handlebars.

The system is designed to display metrics including anaerobic reserve, Normalised Power, IF and TSS, calculated using the rider’s current effective FTP. It can also provide distance-based strategy targets and allow tactical communication between staff and rider, including in areas without conventional mobile coverage.

It represents an interesting change in what we expect from a bike computer.

For years, the head unit has essentially been a screen that tells the rider what is happening.

The next generation could be something different: a device that knows what is happening to the rider and can put that information into context.

The bike computer knows the bike.

e-FORT wants it to understand the athlete.

This isn’t an AI experiment that appeared overnight

There is an important piece of context behind the launch.

e-FORT has not been developed simply because artificial intelligence has become the latest buzzword in technology. The platform is the result of six seasons of working with professional athletes, with Symbtech sponsoring world-class riders since 2021.

According to the company, the technology has already been used in training and competition by professional athletes for months, with a development history that includes a UCI World No. 1, a Cape Epic overall victory, more than 30 Cape Epic stage podiums and 11 stage victories.

That includes Candice Lill, the 2025 UCI World No. 1 and Cape Epic winner.

Then came the professional partnership that gives the launch even more weight.

Decathlon Ford Racing, currently ranked second in UCI XCO, has selected e-FORT as its performance platform for the Olympic cycle through Los Angeles 2028.

That doesn’t mean every promise made by a new technology should automatically be accepted. Cyclists will ultimately judge e-FORT in the same way they judge every other performance tool: by whether it makes them better.

But it does mean the platform is arriving with a development history rooted in elite racing rather than simply an impressive launch presentation.

The really interesting part is that you don’t have to be a professional

This may ultimately be the most disruptive part of the launch.

Professional cycling teams have something most riders don’t: people.

Coaches. Sports scientists. Performance analysts. Mechanics. Race strategists. People whose job is to take enormous amounts of information and turn it into decisions.

Most riders have a Garmin, a phone and themselves.

e-FORT is attempting to narrow that gap.

Its free tier includes synchronisation with Garmin, Polar, Wahoo and Hammerhead, along with core performance and health metrics. The Creator tier adds automated social content, while Premium introduces the full AI coaching environment. Pro adds race strategy, advanced race-craft analysis and stage-race modelling.

Premium is priced at €8.49 per month, while Pro costs €24.90 per month.

That places the technology firmly in consumer territory.

And that is important because the real opportunity for e-FORT isn’t simply to make professional riders better.

It is to make some of the thinking that surrounds professional athletes available to everyone else.

The next revolution may not be another sensor

Cycling technology has spent the last decade teaching us to measure more.

The next decade may be about teaching technology to understand better.

There is only so much value in another metric, another graph or another dashboard. At some point, the athlete doesn’t need more information. They need someone — or something — to make sense of the information already available.

That is the bet e-FORT is making.

It wants to understand the rider’s history, current condition, training, recovery, goals and race environment and bring all of those pieces together before making a recommendation.

It isn’t simply asking what happened on the bike.

It is asking why it happened, what it means and what should happen next.

That is a much bigger idea than another cycling app.

It is a different philosophy for performance technology.

For years, our devices have been getting better at measuring us. Now the challenge is whether they can become better at understanding us.

Because cyclists don’t really need another number telling them what they already did.

They need technology that can help them understand what those numbers mean — and what to do with them.

We don’t need more cycling data.

We need intelligence that understands us.