Reading this story, as long as it is, was quite interesting to me. I've been on the other end of the lies. As a young person, ranging from middle school to early 20's, I was repeatedly duped by people who lied to me over and over again, making up fantastic stories that were tailored to my interests and gullibility. They used these lies to gain my friendship, to control my actions to get what they wanted, or to in one case, try to dupe me into marriage (not kidding).
Yeah, I was super naïve.
But then I read about some of the people affected by Mr. Clark and his lies, and realized that maybe I was a little less culpable in allowing myself to be deceived so much. Just as they wanted to believe him because "why would he lie?" I had reason for wanting to believe, too.
Growing up, I had an aunt who was only a few years older than I who constructed huge fables at every opportunity. She always portrayed herself as either the heroine, the victim, or the Cool Kid. The people around me accepted them, and it wasn't until much later in life that I realized she was absolutely and completely full of crap, a narcissist of the worst kind. But because of my family not confronting her constant lies and embellished stories, I was primed to accept any fantastic story as truth. And... I just now realized this while I was typing. Man. That sure explains a lot.
I don't necessarily disagree, but as a parent you have to be careful what you say to your kids because (particularly when young) they are prone to repeat it to the worst people at the worst possible time.
If my sister was constantly making up fantastic stories and I told my kids privately that she was lying, I'd be better off saying it to her face because when my kids tell her (or someone else in the family) what I said, it will be a disaster and the kids will end up in the middle of it. At least a direct confrontation keeps the kids out of it. But, it better be worth tearing the family apart because that is what would happen.
Yeah as with many things involving kids it depends on knowing when the kids are ready to understand - perhaps going from exaggerating to stories to lying to absolutely full of shit.
Wow, that’s a hell of a story; I’m sorry. Since you’re in a moment of realization: the word for what your aunt did is “gaslighting,” and it can cause lasting trauma. You’re right that, like other forms of abuse, when done as a child it makes one more susceptible to it as an adult.
Gaslighting refers very specifically to presenting a false narrative to cause someone to doubt their perception. His aunt didn't try to make him doubt his own senses, she was just lying.
Well worth the read, but it left me with so many questions.
How much is self-deception? The conclusion of the article makes me think he believes some of his own lies, as if he starting lying so much he doesn't remember what is reality.
The other characters in the story are equally fascinating. Did the retired general know Clark was a grifter, but was happy to collect a pay check sitting on the board? Can you succeed as a defence contractor without buying influence via board seats?
Did Clark purposely team up with unqualified people as a 'shared complicity'? This makes me think he didn't believe his own stories, as he didn't want people in his inner circle who could call out his lies.
When the female cyclist said she would believe Clark if he said the sky was green, what could Clark possibly have done to have so much control over a person? What percent of the population is vulnerable to being sucked into obvious lies?
MLM scams, politics of the Big Lie, investment scams, prophets, miracle cures, etc. The world seems full of these horrible people. How can we help our friends and family avoid being victims if these scammers have such strong powers of persuasion?
They are an de facto faith-based group, so they probably don’t want evangelizing on their doorstep.
If someone showed up trying to peddle their MLM scheme, I expect that they would be asked not to bring their work to the meeting or please don’t come back.
Did he choose to coach amateur women because they seemed any easy mark? They wouldn’t know any better?
What about the mechanic working in the proBikeFC shop all those years and now he takes over as owner? What about Nick’s 3 kids? What happened with his wife? Why didn’t Alexium shareholders sue him? Where was he before he appeared out of apparent obscurity?
I almost want to order his book. Weird that no one thought it was odd he didn’t have a single professional race or military picture from those days!
He is still the second largest shareholder of the company he ripped off? So much more to explore here. Maybe it really could be a Netflix series or podcast?
I loved this story but take issue with the framing. Dishonest reinvention of oneself is not a modern phenomena; my gut feeling is that this was a common occurrence. You have classic fictional books about the premise (IE the Count of Monte Cristo) which at least makes it sound like people used to feel the idea was plausible.
Rather, it strikes me that the ability to determine the lies is the real story here.
30 years ago, who would have questioned this, how would they have investigated this, and who would have paid the long distance bills for phone calls abroad?
There are many example of fantasists and con artists creating fake back stories for themselves. Casanova and Cagliostro are among the most famous examples. Affecting fake noble titles was a favourite ploy.
In Germany the Captain of Köpenick is famous to this day as every child at one point reads Zuckmayers play based on this real story. In 1906 a shoemaker dressed up as a captain of the Prussian army, gathered some soldiers under his command, arrested the major and stole money from the city of Köpenick. He was arrested and served a sentence but became a folk hero and was pardoned by the Kaiser. (1) A striking parallel is the confident use of clothes and signs of authority.
"There was a time, about a year ago, when I swear that there were even references to Nick Clark the pro cyclist in articles in the New York Times, and the Arianna Huffington-owned Thrive Global. The latter was a loving profile of Clark, titled “The story of an entrepreneur, businessman, and cyclist.” Both have since been deleted."
Journalists should learn to use archive.org.
EDIT: Just finished reading. Fine piece of journalism.
Totally agree. I suppose I was one of the duped. But really I didn’t know much about pro cycling and didn’t understand what he was lying about. But when it started coming out 2 years ago, I found everything online within a few hours. Makes me wonder how this got published: https://seancycles.com/2020/07/24/aussie-nick-clark-gets-pez... Why didn’t Pez news doing any research?
KOM = king of the mountain. Apparently it's an award you get when you beat the current best time for a given segment in Strava. The article doesn't expand the abbreviation anywhere which is extremely annoying.
I'm a big fan of always expanding acronyms when used for the first time myself, so I hear ya on that point. That said, I find it slightly more excusable here because the source publication (cyclingtips.com) is targeted to a specific audience, and most members of that audience (as opposed to the public at large) would generally know what a Strava KOM is. I'd find this a more egregious issue if this were in the Washington Post or another "general audience" publication.
It's kinda like how many articles meant for the "standard HN audience" (to the extent that one can speak of such a thing) might use TCP or DNS without expanding them. Not an issue when one of "us" is reading the article, but might trip up a less technically inclined person.
You make a good point about knowledge domains and what can be assumed about the intended audience, but KOM isn't a technical term and pretty much anyone could understand what "king of the mountain" means. Adding a quick aside or popover would make the article approachable to just about anyone.
On the other hand, someone who doesn't know what TCP is isn't going to understand the expansion to "Transmission Control Protocol" either. They would need to read up on at least basic networking first, so links to further reading would be more helpful.
it's not excusable. if it cost $1000 to define it, sure, and it doesn't. it's four words surrounded by parentheses.
no one is born knowing these things, and a lot of people discover a new hobby or interest via reading articles about areas in which they are otherwise uninformed.
no excuse for this. just put the meaning in. takes you less time than it takes one person to Google it, nevermind multiple (dozens/hundreds/thousands of) people who are actually going to need to Google it because you're too presumptuous to type four words and two parentheses in a 10,000 word article.
wow that was really long but i read almost all of it. a lot of it is just going into details that are necessary to condemn him without committing libel, i feel like. the most impressive bit is that he became the CEO of a publicly traded company with totally fake CV and no education and was paid more than a million dollars. and now he works at a gun shop literally across the street from the old bike shop, peddling lies about being in the special forces.
it always astounds me how stupid people are. when i was 14 i had a buddy who was really into cycling and he told me that lance armstrong, a national hero at that point, was a liar and a doper. it seemed insane to me and i just brushed it off. and then a long time after that, it was in the headlines. in retrospect it was completely obvious. there are a lot of things like that. here is something that will seem insane to you but will be in the headlines in a decade or two: saturated animal fat doesnt cause heart disease. it will be fun to think back!
I'm going to push back on the Lance Armstrong bit. As you point out, anyone who followed racing at the time knew that the top tier were all doping or at least some if you wanted to pretend your hero was clean. Here is a retrospective article about its pervasiveness [1]. But, it does not take much intelligence to figure out that a banned substance, EPO, that did not have a test until 2000 was being used in the 90s. The reason why Armstrong is much more infamous is because the scale of the operation the U.S. Postal Service Pro Cycling Team was conducting and the leading role Armstrong played on the team and the success he had. That being said, putting ethics aside for a second, what they did is no different than the level of performance squeezing that teams like Ineos or Jumbo Visma do today. They weren't gaining by the lies themselves (like the person in the story) but to keep their methods hidden from other teams.
Reminds me of these here stories from Darrell Waltrip about some of the ways the NASCAR teams use to cheat back in his era lol very interesting bit of racing history that doesn't usually get talked about =p
I read it, I wanted to believe it but I will not endorse what’s in there (mostly because I am now much more cautious about cherry picked slick slightly against the establishment stories).
While here I will post a book that did change my life in a rather dramatic fashion [1].
Also a good functional medicine doctor is worth every bill they charge.
The diet-heart hypothesis promoted by Ancel Keys was based on bad science, cherry-picked data, and gross generalisations. The saturated fat used in his experiments was vegetable oil (margarine) and he extrapolated the results to animal fat.
The current theory is that heart disease is caused by vegetable oil and sugar.
The Paleo and keto enthusiasts demonize Keys as the root cause of the western world's obesity problem.
For books, try
* "Good calories, bad calories" - Gary Taubes
* The Paleo Solution - Robb Wolf
How do people manage to read modern science with a straight face? Is there anything more scientific - verifiable and reproducible - than our ancestral family tree relying on meats and saturated fats to live?
I created a Strava segment in my neighborhood and started to monitor it. I quickly found a couple cheaters and flagged them. Some I could tell some were just bad GPS data, such as riding a bike in a lake. I usually take mine down if the GPS is totally off. However, some were definitely blatant cheating, such as cycling at 80 mph when the road speed is 40mph.
I gave up on Strava long ago and now only use it to "benchmark" myself. How well did i do on this ride vs the last time i took this trip?
The cheating on Strava is just shameful. you often see people with impressive KOM scores, but then check their ride history and it is pathetic and clear they cheated. Someone with 3 rides and an average speed of just 8km/h posting a 55KM climb up a 6 Degree incline? Sure...
As the other guy posted, strava's DEV's need to do more to stop this. Cross-reference the KOM with the rider's history.. or even just exclude things that are simply not possible??
I've had my GPS mess up, and sometimes post that i was traveling hundreds of KM/h and flagged those trips myself.. I would think that an average speed of 833 km/h should be a red flag for strava as well, but it wasnt?
Lastly, i fail to understand the whole point of cheating in the first place. Great, you got KOM on something, and everyone saw this, knows you cheated and so?
I gave up on it, but for a different reason. Strava is basically "done" in that all the roads have been ridden tens of thousands (and even hundreds of thousands) of times. Take away the cheating and the ranking on climbs just becomes ossified over time. It basically started out as a fun activity and turned into a public performance that nobody else cared about.
There are plenty of other apps out there you can use to track your personal progress that don't have the "social" bit attached.
Strava's social aspect is easy to control. Dont follow anyone, and you can even boot others who follow you. You can also mark yourself "follow by request" which seems to facilitate cheating as well (you can see their KOM, but not their rides?).
This speaks to the changes strava needs to make. if the rider is "by invite only" all KOM's should be hidden as well.
Strava does a decent job tracking myself, and once i turned off all the social. media aspects and stopped looking at other riders it became much better.
Dealing with fakers is one of the key problems for any service like Strava. I have a set of ten segments that I do around town, and I constantly see bike times posted as running. I think most are accidents (e.g. forgot to change the activity type on their watch) but I've noticed some folks who seem more deliberate about it. BTW it's really not hard to tell. I've even seen a couple of times that were people in their cars, but those were even more obviously accidents.
To their credit, Strava tends to be really good about taking down times once they're flagged. OTOH, one of my own runs got flagged once, and the weird thing is that it wasn't even a particularly good time or anomalous in any way. If somebody wants to erase one of my below-average runs from the record, I think I'm good with that. :D
The thing is that Strava doesn't even try to automatically flag activities that are obviously fake or cheating. Their developers just seem completely lazy or incompetent. Like it should be trivial to automatically flag any activity that is significantly faster than the world record for that distance.
> developers just seem completely lazy or incompetent
why? you really don't need to go down that road. Are you a developer yourself? because I'm sure you don't enjoy someone saying you're lazy because you haven't implemented a feature that some rando on the internet thinks you should. You must not be a developer because you can't possible think that this decision lands squarely on the shoulders of the dev team.
I've had my GPS go haywire and tell me my average speed was 833km/h. Do you think it is unreasonable to assume strava should have flagged this?
Strava needs to take more ownership of the rampant cheating. It is costing them users, and causing the overall quality of the product to go downhill. I use to be a big strava fan, now the only thing i use it for is to benchmark myself as anything else isnt worthwhile given the rampant cheating that takes place.
There are a few cases that are trivial, but there are a lot more that can be very difficult. I'm sure the devs err on the side of avoiding false positives, because that could really enrage a user.
The problem is that the Strava developers have been too lazy to even catch the most obvious cases where there is zero risk of false positives. Like if someone "runs" a mile in 3:25 on a flat segment, is that really possible? It would be absolutely trivial to automatically flag those cases, but they haven't bothered to even try.
again you call the devs lazy. you really need to sit back and think about what you say. There is nothing more apparent to me that you have no idea what you're talking about when you say that. Obviously you've never worked on a large team or in development at all. Strava probably doesn't think its worth it, and has absolutely nothing to do with the development team.
My commute goes past a velodrome that sits next to a short, steep hill. Every day there were new times on that hill that would be difficult for some cars to achieve. It was pretty obvious that many people forget to turn it off, and never bother to trim the data.
I'm an avid cyclist and this was a fascinating article. Well researched and well written. The author put in a lot of time to track down all the lies, but it sort of glosses over one point.
There had to be a ton of people that knew it was made up and did nothing. Why did't anyone make him put up or shut up?
If I lived within a few hundred miles of his shop, I would have dropped by just to meet him and get something I needed, probably more than once. When I got home I would have looked him up. Not to find a lie but because this is what I do. I meet a new interesting person and I want to dive a little deeper. It makes the experience more satisfying to me when I flesh it out with more details and photos.
A lot of this narrative takes place before everything was online, but I would expect to find some things. Finding nothing outside of the fakeable stuff like LinkedIn I would have dived deeper. The temporary Wikipedia listing would have really lit me up.
Seems to me that a hundred bikers knew about this clown and just let it fly.
Yeah that part is interesting while unfortunately being largely unknowable. A lot of people might've been aware of one or two lies and thought "Well what's the harm?" It's only when (as the author says) you start to appreciate the full picture that you realize what the harm is.
Well the lies slowly grew. They didn’t get wide circulation until 2021. By then he had befriended a lot of folks who were blinded by friendship. He took it too far with all the bogus KOMs and the Pez article. People did notice and everyone knew in 2020. The guys at the bike shop did nothing because they wanted a job. The women did nothing because they believed the second round of lies (it was all a misunderstanding about doping). Ultimately no one really cared enough about this none sense because they had real problems like COVID to deal with and no one had the time the author did to publish it all in one place.
I’m always reminded of “the curious case of the PI moms” when deception is involved. It’s different but another strange tale. The takeaway quote it “people want to believe”
What I don't get is how people didn't notice during the group rides. I've ridden a few times with former athletes, and there was no mistaking the difference between an amateur like me and a former pro..
It's actually a similar story (minus the fraud): my local Trek dealership [in Budapest, Hungary, when I live there] had a few salesman who were former professional (tri)athletes, one of them was the hungarian national triathlon champion in his youth days. Some of the other guys working there were former mechanics for teams.
When we went for group rides, there was no mistaking their performance. The former national champion (sub-9 IM times)---although he wasn't actively training---was leading the pack, maintaining a 40+ km/h pace in strong headwind, veins popping on his legs. After a crazy 100km ride he took us for a run and was dishing out a sub-4:30 pace for "good training". You can't make that up.
Also, sometimes (very rarely) he'd still go to races and finish with very impressive times, often/usually winning his age group (eg. 40-45). He said he doesn't like going to races anymore, because his competitive side is crazy strong, and it bothers him if somebody is faster than him, even if they're younger. He had a very different, very competitive mentality compared to non-pro amateurs. An amateur, even soneone who trains very hard to get good times / PBs, usually isn't bothered by poeple being faster, because as an amateur that's always the case (pros are always way faster).
Just a few random thoughts in no particular order:
It's ironic that his fake career arc kind of paralleled a lot of people's real ones. After fake-achieving everything he wanted to in the corporate world, he had a crisis moment and/or reached an age where he probably started thinking more about what fake career could come next and be more fake-fulfilling. Hence, the fake cycling thing. (On the other hand, it might just be that the Alexium lies collapsed and he was forced to move on, literally reinventing himself like he did again later when he ended up in the gun trade.)
Lindsey Graham's expression looks like he has already figured out this guy is full of shit. Bob Brookins also. (Though of course my eye has been pretty well jaundiced by this point in the piece.)
I guess Cycling Tips doesn't want to guess publicly what really happened to his wife, presumably due to defamation case law, but I'll go ahead and publicly "muse" that maybe she was about to blow the lid off his fakery. Anyway I've watched enough Dateline NBC to know that
1. Spouses always kill each other 100% of the time. (That's actually just a joke about Dateline.)
2. People who are already hiding something often turn out to have pretty strong motives for murder.
3. Regardless of 1 or 2, lies or changing stories about a person's cause of death (even if, and kind of especially if, it's by a guy who's lying about everything else) is at least cause for an investigation.
The mystery about the wife's illness and cause of death is actually a very good endorsement of HIPAA health information privacy laws. Not too long ago, medical records were leaked and all sorts of privacy was violated. I am happy to see the preservation of privacy in this case, although I am curious as heck too.
This line, a comment from one of the riders on his women's team, says a lot:
> he needed to be adored and respected
He does have some sort of narcissistic personality disorder going on, aided and abetted by the ease of publishing or telling lies that few people will ever check.
Makes me wonder about the breathless bios and claims in VC and CEO bios, or hinted at in interviews. Military service, elite university backgrounds, and sole founder status seem to pop up a lot.
The military ones would usually get away with it if they didn’t wear fake medals from every conflict and operation from WW2 onwards and always declare they were such and such SF unit.
Why is that though? I used to watch Don shipleys YouTube channel about stolen valor quite religiously, seems like looking up dates of service/enlistment shouldn’t be that challenging
One thing that helped him was he was perpetrating this last round of frauds in the US and was an Australian citizen. It just makes it a little more difficult for those of us in the US to fact check somethings. He crafted his story with just enough confusing details and remote locations that finding the truth wasn’t super easy, but it was still doable.
Nick Clark was outgoing, funny, high energy, and definitely a big personality. If you gave him any sort of praise, he was friendly and made you feel like you were part of the cycling family. He hosted little BBQs after every ride and spoke of all things European in an Aussie accent, and sold fancy bike brands most beginners hadn’t heard of before. He surrounded himself with adoring women from the PBFC team, local law enforcement and first responder types, and there was a full time personal trainer who was a legitimate retired army officer, so it disarmed any misgivings you might have. He could ride a bike reasonably fast. It just felt genuine even when it wasn’t. It was all my design. He created a little world where he was King, King of the Mountain, and King of local cycling in his mind anyway. Although, it wasn’t like he was that central to the DC biking scene.
Ich bin als Tochter mit einer narzistischen Mutter aufgewachsen. Ich weiß was das bedeutet einen Münchhausen Menschen erleben und ertragen zu müssen. Der Narzist ist widerlich, erbärmlich und auch sehr gefährlich für die Psyche seiner Opfer! Ich habe dadurch sensible Antennen für Lügner und Möchtegerns entwickelt, aber musste dafür auch viele leidvolle Erfahrungen sammeln. Heute laufe ich so schnell ich kann, bevor mich ein narzistisches Wesen nochmal in seine selbstbemitleidende, kontrollierende Hände bekommt!
omg! I used to go to this shop all the time when it was ProBike Falls Church or PBFC. One day the mechanic became the owner and the sales guys never gave a straight answer about where the owner was. Now it’s called Vida Ciclista, but it sells the same stuff. I do remember all the medals and fancy bike frames, I never heard the full range of lies he told, just that he was “pro” a long time ago. It makes sense now, he was just some doughy middle age corporate hack trying to be one of the cool kids and ended up with a bib wedgie instead.
The part that really stuck out to me was from one of the people he had duped, saying that if Clark had told her the sky was green she would have believed him. There are definitely people in the world who seem able to cast an almost hypnotic spell over people like that, but seemingly only in person. This seems to be the case with both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. Examples about in business too, including (especially?) tech. Having worked at Facebook, I felt that Mark Zuckerberg also has this quality.
I don't think it's magic. I don't think it's pheromones. If I had to guess I'd say that it's something about learning - consciously or otherwise - to fool the heuristics that most of us use to distinguish lies from truth. Things like voice, facial expression, body language. Whatever it is, it seems quite real. Nick Clark was somehow able to fool a great many people, some of them quite savvy, and there are many examples like his.
But to be honest, I wouldn't have been curious about that climb. Doesn't seem that remarkable to me, because I think I've done similar in my youth, beginning around 1981/2, until around 1995/96. After that time not so much anymore, because of time constraints, work, and so on.
Anyways, on a 27x1 1/4 Hercules, for about 600,- DM, 10 speed only, really nothing special, but robust. "Entry level" at best. Err, and no doping at all!
I did this in 4 minutes https://goo.gl/maps/UwG86KBp1QiFuwt1A which has parts at 8% in Quellenstraße, and 12% in Freier Weg, with only 2 short flat parts, the rest is all uphill untill the end. I remember doing 45 to 48 kph on the 8% part, and 40 to 45kph on the 12% part, otherwise short bursts up to 60kph where possible.
Repeatedly, this was my "home run" to get warmed up for zipping trough the adjacent "Kottenforst" (With up 70 to 75kph on flat grounds, at times, when it was mostly empty)
And https://goo.gl/maps/oRvGeu41hPxeZrSU9 in 19 minutes, which is slightly downhill for the first part, but still impressive. Not alone. Together with a classmate who was member of a bicycling sports club and had a much better bike. We synced our wrist watches at the start. He was knocked out for a while, while I felt almost nothing, just elation :-)
Nobody believed us the next week in school. (We did this on a saturday, around noon)
At these times I did at least 80 to 150km daily, depending on the weather, sometimes even 300km, which I didn't even notice at first. Other people noticed the trip distance, while I've been only fixed on the needle, because speed is what I need! ;->
Whatever, that were only the most memorable things where I can be absolutely sure I don't remember them wrong.
So I guess what I'm saying is that when I could do these things, while not professionally trained, not member of some bicycling sports club, with only an entry level road cycle/"randonneur", not doped, just for fun, in my youth...
...then that piece which made others suspicious initially, wouldn't have seemed unlikely to me at all.
Edit: And when my bicycle was broken, or lacked spare parts, I did a Marathon through the https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kottenforst , sometimes 2km less, sometimes 2 more, depending on route. Though I don't remember the time anymore, probably fast. Running was mostly 'uninteresting' to me. I could do it easily, but bicycling was more fun.
Taking this in good faith, as the HN guidelines ask us to, I'm fairly certain that either your recollection or your measuring equipment is faulty.
Taking the "less impressive" https://goo.gl/maps/t1soU1WKtb7UBuwA9 as an example, you're claiming 60kph (37 mph) for nearly an hour over flat terrain. According to this cycling calculator [1] with some generous assumptions, that's over 800W average for an hour -- smashing the world record of 440 [2]. Similarly, that handily beats the world record of 55km in one hour [3], set by a professional in a velodrome under perfect conditions with a custom bike (including being at altitude for lower air resistance)
These claims are from 30-40 years ago so I don't fault you for misremembering specific times and distances, but cycling is a sport where people really obsess over numbers and metrics, and these just don't pass the sniff test.
Well. What can I say? I've been unaware of the hour record.
What I can do say is that at the times I described my sustainable top performance on flat grounds without (noticable) winds as 55kph for one hour. Though that is hard to compare to something done in a velodrome, or on closed streets, since I did that in normal traffic. OFC I had to sometimes stop because of red lights which I couldn't overrun without crashing or causing crashes. Also I needed something to eat after that, like a banana, or an apple, maybe some nuts, and to drink, water, orange juice, or something isotonic.
However, in cities I've comfortably gone with the flow of cars, sometimes overtaking them, outside of them there was now flow, because less cars.
Maybe it's a good thing not knowing what the record is? :-)
Regarding the route on google maps which I posted, and you reposted, I don't know
wtf google is doing! The route it shows when I click your repost isn't what it showed me when I reconstructed it to show!
Edit: rechecked right now, it is even showing me another one.
That is unusable, because for the one I reconstructed to show here I already marked the vias to get the right one. Somehow that seems to get lost in the link it presents to share.
Edit: further reading about those records...
I wore lose fitting t-shirts, and short sport shorts. no helmet, and didn't shave my legs. Also, the heresy of not wearing pure white socks! And no special shoes clicking into the pedals, just normal running shoes fitting into something called "Tretkorb" on the pedal.
That isn't really flat, but mostly downsloped for the first half, even if only slightly. I know it sounds unreasonable, because people then didn't believe me either.
Except when they've seen me doing it.
Edit: I also caught fire for being unimpressed with Tour de France and the likes, at the times.
Edit: Also klicking that link it seems to be a different route now, which would be a detour almost to the Airport of Cologne. (Sigh). The route I took was more direct, about 55km.
I think the point was how many other lives and how much money was affected by just one person and to unravel it.
I mean there are several books and movies written about Armstrong and the like, cycling is full of drama and people apparently like it because Armstrong has a huge fanbase and is still very successful/wealthy despite all his exposed corruption and doping.
I am sure there are plenty of serious amateurs who are clean and honest but to this day I cannot watch professional cycling of any kind, they are all doping and cheating one way or another just using the excuse "well everyone else is doing it".
When I read statements like this, I always wider what people think is happening in other sports, especially those where there is much more money involved. I mean the US professional sports don't even have proper testing. Baseball has had plenty of steroid abuse, for basketball one only need to look at how players look after a year of playing in the NBA (Dirk Nowitzki was a tall skinny boy when in Germany, he gained >20kg of muscle mass in the first season of the NBA). Soccer has had plenty of cases where games of referees and players trying to throw games, for betting or other bribes.
The thing is that cycling has just not enough money/influence in contrast to other sports. Just one example, in operacion puerto, which exposed blood doping of many cyclist. When there were strong indications that many of the so far unidentified blood conserves belonged to Real Madrid players, political influence quickly led to the whole investigation being cancelled.
I'm not defending doping in cycling, but it is extremely naive to believe that sports with several orders of magnitude more money involved dont have rampant doping.
One of Armstrong's team mates from US Postal days wrote a tell all biography after he was banned for doping: Tyler Hamilton the secret race, in it (paraphrasing) he said he saw athletes from every professional sport in the waiting room of the private doctor who was doing his doping.
I read Tyler’s book and don’t recall him saying that quite so directly. It is surely true though.
I met him at an unsanctioned/non-UCI race he showed up at during his ban but before he came clean. Weird experience, he obviously won the race and most people were supportive but it was such a weird scene. You could practically feel the tormented aura of guilt/shame/embarrassment coming off him. IIRC he had won that race as an amateur prior to doping as well.
I don't recall reading that part either. The book is a great book though, not just for the doping part but also because it gives a very interesting behind the scenes view of many iconic cycling moments of that time.
It has been a while since I read the book but skimming it now I can only see the Spanish police unofficially linked tennis players and soccer teams to the Spanish doctor they were using.
Most people to my knowledge think the exposure of this damaged baseball seriously, and maybe irreparably. It at least made fandom more local; World Series ratings are half what they were 20 years ago during the bulk of the steroid frenzy.
All of the friends of mine that have competed in competition level E-Sports have each told me individually at some point or another that literally - every - professional player uses either Adderall or methamphetamine during tournaments
Extend it to every professional sport. Cycling was one which
tried doing something about the problem and paid a heavy price in popularity, funding and public perception. Other major sports won't repeat this mistake.
Soccer for example has none significant doping controls and it's obvious that every top player is doped to the gills. There is probably not a single clean one in top clubs. NBA is just a joke as well as is tennis.
About the only sport org other than cycling that tried to do something about the problem is the UFC. Before/after photos of some fighters are just amazing (they are way smaller/less muscular after introduction of doping protocols) even though you can still get away with some doping (some is difficult to detect or very short lived).
> I cannot watch professional cycling of any kind, they are all doping and cheating one way
You're missing out on some awesome displays of athleticism because of this wrong idea. At the top level doping has been stamped out more than in any other sport.
On the other hand I could name some huge mainstream sport associations that don't follow the WADA code and implement suspiciously lax doping controls, but perhaps that would derail the thread.
speaking about doping - as Russian sportsmen are mostly banned internationally due to the war, the top Russian sports officials have been publicly talking about "taking the Russian sport to the next level" by removing various supposedly stifling limits enforced by the international sport organizations. Officially those officials supposedly meant various technical limits and rules in various sports, while one can only wonder about what they would do with doping now that nobody is really watching (and given what they have already done when WADA was watching), and as they got that huge propaganda task of "taking to the next level" what they have to deliver on. So, get ready for Russian sportsmen say running 100m in 5 sec. with pure doping in their veins instead of blood :)
There's some scary stories from 80s when EPO usage was essentialy untested, teams and individuals pushed it to such extremes that athletes had to wake up in the middle of the night to stop their heart rate dropping too low as their blood was so viscous cardiac arrest was a real concern.
If it's permitted, then it becomes obligatory. In sports where doping was tacitly permitted, chances are that it was unthinkable for a player to even be a contender for the elite level without doping.
If obligatory, then it starts killing people. Consider football and concussions.
And then there's marketing. A certain amount of risk is accepted in sports, and is part of what makes it attractive to fans and sponsors. But when someone actually dies at an event, it overshadows everything else that happens. If that becomes a regular occurrence, fans and sponsors who pay for the coverage will begin to lose interest.
Part of the reason for rules in sports is to make a sport interesting for the fans, e.g., by preventing each match from being decided by a single factor that is predictable ahead of time. Financial sports already have financial rules. Pharmacological sports need pharmacological rules.
Well I enjoyed it. And to some degree (as I've said elsewhere on this thread and as the author himself kind of indicates), in order to appreciate the scale of the deceptions, you have to see the whole picture. And getting there takes some effort. But yeah, if I weren't reading this for entertainment I would want to be paid, for sure.
There's a lot more to it than that. If you're curious, you can skip to further sections in the article to find out more - he manipulated and harmed lots of people and his conduct is way more complex than just one faked career.
Yeah he kinda screwed over an entire publicly traded company. He made millions as a very under qualified CEO on a fake CV. He was a real scum bag to a lot of people well before his fake pro cycling career. He lives in a million dollar house in one of the most expensive neighborhoods outside DC, renovated and paid for by local cyclist who thought they were buying from a real expert. That is before he got all the COVID stimulus money. He’s doing quite well, and other than having to reinvent himself, he really didn’t lose much except a temporary boost to his ego. The lesson here is faking it and taking shortcuts seems to work well for white men in America.
Yeah, I was super naïve.
But then I read about some of the people affected by Mr. Clark and his lies, and realized that maybe I was a little less culpable in allowing myself to be deceived so much. Just as they wanted to believe him because "why would he lie?" I had reason for wanting to believe, too.
Growing up, I had an aunt who was only a few years older than I who constructed huge fables at every opportunity. She always portrayed herself as either the heroine, the victim, or the Cool Kid. The people around me accepted them, and it wasn't until much later in life that I realized she was absolutely and completely full of crap, a narcissist of the worst kind. But because of my family not confronting her constant lies and embellished stories, I was primed to accept any fantastic story as truth. And... I just now realized this while I was typing. Man. That sure explains a lot.