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Exposed by a Strava KOM: The Many Lives of a Fake Pro Cyclist

162 points by altStoner 4y ago

helsinkiandrew 4y ago
Wonder what makes people do this, reminds me of the marathon runner faking his results discussed a couple of months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30622770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30622770
trk_krt 4y ago
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.
lom 4y ago
I started reading this, but then realized it was almost 20000 words long.. how much is there to say? He faked his career, then got called out after some time, this topic really isn’t worth all the effort that was put into it
- ck2 4y ago
  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". (adding link to reddit analysis just to be useful https://old.reddit.com/r/Velo/duplicates/uegizk https://old.reddit.com/r/Velo/duplicates/uegizk )
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    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.
    - waxyalan 4y ago
      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.
      - ben7799 4y ago
        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.
        cycomanic 4y ago
        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.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  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.
  - trustBUTverify 4y ago
    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.
- rdiddly 4y ago
  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.
philshem 4y ago
KOM = King/Queen of the mountain, the record holder for a Strava segment
abdel_nasser 4y ago
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!
- Bancakes 4y ago
  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?
- pikma 4y ago
  > saturated animal fat doesnt cause heart disease Can you please tell me more? I would love for this to be true, is there evidence for this?
  - jnsaff2 4y ago
    I guess this book is a good start [0]. 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. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Get_Fat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Get_Fat [1] https://www.amymyersmd.com/sp/the-thyroid-connection-paperback-edition/ https://www.amymyersmd.com/sp/the-thyroid-connection-paperba...
langsoul-com 4y ago
This was a wild fucking journey. It's always the follow up lies that fuck you over. They just get more and more elaborate overtime, so any plausibility disappears. So moral of the story, if you're gonna lie, keep the chapter around 3 months. Or at most a year.
jbm 4y ago
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?
- simonh 4y ago
  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.
  - mitjam 4y ago
    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. (1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Voigt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Voigt
geocrasher 4y ago
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.
- gilgoomesh 4y ago
  Family members don’t call out narcissists as a polite way of moving past it. They don’t want to fight every 5 minutes. I’m sorry that gave you the wrong impression.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    One of the duties of parents is to call out bullshit privately for their children so they can also learn the distinction.
    - freedomben 4y ago
      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.
arpinum 4y ago
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?
- ehvatum 4y ago
  > How can we help our friends and family avoid being victims if these scammers have such strong powers of persuasion? Take your credulous friends to an AA meeting, now and then. It’s basically a workshop against every kind of deception.
  - eli 4y ago
    Rubbernecking an AA meeting feels wrong
    - wl 4y ago
      AA meetings are often designated as "open" or "closed." The "open" ones are open to the public.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      Magnificent Obsession, the late Jim Nayder's WBEZ show, is basically an extended AA/NA style share. This may be an archive of some sort, but I can't see it because I'm not an Apple customer. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/magnificent-obsession/id976827362 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/magnificent-obsession/... edit: https://soundcloud.com/magnificent-obsession https://soundcloud.com/magnificent-obsession
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acomjean 4y ago
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” https://www.thisamericanlife.org/447/transcript https://www.thisamericanlife.org/447/transcript
marcodiego 4y ago
"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.
- trustBUTverify 4y ago
  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-pezd/ https://seancycles.com/2020/07/24/aussie-nick-clark-gets-pez... Why didn’t Pez news doing any research?
cyberpanther 4y ago
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.
- notacoward 4y ago
  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
  - nradov 4y ago
    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.
    - stereocodes 4y ago
      > 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.
notacoward 4y ago
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.
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ilamont 4y ago
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.
- mikeodds 4y ago
  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.
  - iab 4y ago
    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
- trustBUTverify 4y ago
  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.
saila 4y ago
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.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  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.
  - rdiddly 4y ago
    Or "HN" for that matter
  - naikrovek 4y ago
    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.
  - saila 4y ago
    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.
doogerdog 4y ago
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.
- rdiddly 4y ago
  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.
- trustBUTverify 4y ago
  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.
rdiddly 4y ago
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.
- sleepytimetea 4y ago
  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.
  - trk_krt 4y ago
    https://amp.theaustralian.com.au/nation/nick-clark-says-he-had-to-fake-credentials-so-he-could-get-a-go-among-the-business-establishment/news-story/5b7f79cf9672de83436d5e3d9be3d245 https://amp.theaustralian.com.au/nation/nick-clark-says-he-h... But also about his wife? Some parallels to the Peterson case no? How he lied about things in his life, his military career and all?
LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
Phew! What a (doxxing) "ride". 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 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) I also did https://goo.gl/maps/88dwer9hSYyHij9c9 https://goo.gl/maps/88dwer9hSYyHij9c9 in 24 minutes, which is one minute less than very progressive drivers did by car :-) Repeatedly. And https://goo.gl/maps/oRvGeu41hPxeZrSU9 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) And https://goo.gl/maps/t1soU1WKtb7UBuwA9 https://goo.gl/maps/t1soU1WKtb7UBuwA9 in 55 minutes, less impressive, but still... Oh! And https://goo.gl/maps/aV83yCj9WHFUs52FA https://goo.gl/maps/aV83yCj9WHFUs52FA and similar many times, in anything between 25 and 18 minutes, really strong uphilling, there is a reason for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drachenfels_Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drachenfels_Railway :-) 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 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.
Maro 4y ago
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..
- trustBUTverify 4y ago
  Well he was decently fast. And he used the ole “I am old/fat excuse…” but yeah most amateurs haven’t ridden with ex pros so how would we know?
  - Maro 4y ago
    Perhaps I was lucky. 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).
wheres_my_exit2 4y ago
Wow Nick Clark in Falls Church, Va! What is it with all the whacky news stories in Fairfax County right now? Isn’t the Johnny Depp trial here too?
sports_fanatic 4y ago
wheres_my_exit2 4y ago
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.
zentauri666 4y ago
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!

162 points by altStoner 4y ago

Wonder what makes people do this, reminds me of the marathon runner faking his results discussed a couple of months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30622770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30622770

trk_krt 4y ago

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.

lom 4y ago

I started reading this, but then realized it was almost 20000 words long.. how much is there to say? He faked his career, then got called out after some time, this topic really isn’t worth all the effort that was put into it

ck2 4y ago
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". (adding link to reddit analysis just to be useful https://old.reddit.com/r/Velo/duplicates/uegizk https://old.reddit.com/r/Velo/duplicates/uegizk )
- cycomanic 4y ago
  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.
  - waxyalan 4y ago
    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.
    - ben7799 4y ago
      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.
      - cycomanic 4y ago
        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.
kevingadd 4y ago
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.
- trustBUTverify 4y ago
  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.
rdiddly 4y ago
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.

philshem 4y ago

KOM = King/Queen of the mountain, the record holder for a Strava segment

abdel_nasser 4y ago

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!

Bancakes 4y ago
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?
pikma 4y ago
> saturated animal fat doesnt cause heart disease Can you please tell me more? I would love for this to be true, is there evidence for this?
- jnsaff2 4y ago
  I guess this book is a good start [0]. 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. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Get_Fat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Get_Fat [1] https://www.amymyersmd.com/sp/the-thyroid-connection-paperback-edition/ https://www.amymyersmd.com/sp/the-thyroid-connection-paperba...

langsoul-com 4y ago

This was a wild fucking journey. It's always the follow up lies that fuck you over. They just get more and more elaborate overtime, so any plausibility disappears. So moral of the story, if you're gonna lie, keep the chapter around 3 months. Or at most a year.

jbm 4y ago

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?

simonh 4y ago
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.
- mitjam 4y ago
  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. (1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Voigt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Voigt

geocrasher 4y ago

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.

gilgoomesh 4y ago
Family members don’t call out narcissists as a polite way of moving past it. They don’t want to fight every 5 minutes. I’m sorry that gave you the wrong impression.
- bombcar 4y ago
  One of the duties of parents is to call out bullshit privately for their children so they can also learn the distinction.
  - freedomben 4y ago
    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.

arpinum 4y ago

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?

ehvatum 4y ago
> How can we help our friends and family avoid being victims if these scammers have such strong powers of persuasion? Take your credulous friends to an AA meeting, now and then. It’s basically a workshop against every kind of deception.
- eli 4y ago
  Rubbernecking an AA meeting feels wrong
  - wl 4y ago
    AA meetings are often designated as "open" or "closed." The "open" ones are open to the public.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Magnificent Obsession, the late Jim Nayder's WBEZ show, is basically an extended AA/NA style share. This may be an archive of some sort, but I can't see it because I'm not an Apple customer. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/magnificent-obsession/id976827362 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/magnificent-obsession/... edit: https://soundcloud.com/magnificent-obsession https://soundcloud.com/magnificent-obsession

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acomjean 4y ago

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” https://www.thisamericanlife.org/447/transcript https://www.thisamericanlife.org/447/transcript

marcodiego 4y ago

"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.

trustBUTverify 4y ago
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-pezd/ https://seancycles.com/2020/07/24/aussie-nick-clark-gets-pez... Why didn’t Pez news doing any research?

cyberpanther 4y ago

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.

notacoward 4y ago
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
- nradov 4y ago
  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.
  - stereocodes 4y ago
    > 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.

notacoward 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago

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ilamont 4y ago

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.

mikeodds 4y ago
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.
- iab 4y ago
  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
trustBUTverify 4y ago
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.

saila 4y ago

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.

mindcrime 4y ago
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.
- rdiddly 4y ago
  Or "HN" for that matter
- naikrovek 4y ago
  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.
- saila 4y ago
  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.

doogerdog 4y ago

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.

rdiddly 4y ago
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.
trustBUTverify 4y ago
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.

rdiddly 4y ago

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.

sleepytimetea 4y ago
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.
- trk_krt 4y ago
  https://amp.theaustralian.com.au/nation/nick-clark-says-he-had-to-fake-credentials-so-he-could-get-a-go-among-the-business-establishment/news-story/5b7f79cf9672de83436d5e3d9be3d245 https://amp.theaustralian.com.au/nation/nick-clark-says-he-h... But also about his wife? Some parallels to the Peterson case no? How he lied about things in his life, his military career and all?

LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago

Phew! What a (doxxing) "ride". 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 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) I also did https://goo.gl/maps/88dwer9hSYyHij9c9 https://goo.gl/maps/88dwer9hSYyHij9c9 in 24 minutes, which is one minute less than very progressive drivers did by car :-) Repeatedly. And https://goo.gl/maps/oRvGeu41hPxeZrSU9 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) And https://goo.gl/maps/t1soU1WKtb7UBuwA9 https://goo.gl/maps/t1soU1WKtb7UBuwA9 in 55 minutes, less impressive, but still... Oh! And https://goo.gl/maps/aV83yCj9WHFUs52FA https://goo.gl/maps/aV83yCj9WHFUs52FA and similar many times, in anything between 25 and 18 minutes, really strong uphilling, there is a reason for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drachenfels_Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drachenfels_Railway :-) 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 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.

Maro 4y ago

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..

trustBUTverify 4y ago
Well he was decently fast. And he used the ole “I am old/fat excuse…” but yeah most amateurs haven’t ridden with ex pros so how would we know?
- Maro 4y ago
  Perhaps I was lucky. 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).

wheres_my_exit2 4y ago

Wow Nick Clark in Falls Church, Va! What is it with all the whacky news stories in Fairfax County right now? Isn’t the Johnny Depp trial here too?

sports_fanatic 4y ago

wheres_my_exit2 4y ago

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.

zentauri666 4y ago

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!