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
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 )
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.
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).
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.
He would be broke if he hadn't hit the jackpot with a $100k Uber investment.
Wouldn't it be safer for everyone if it was all out in the open?
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!
[1] - https://www.businessinsider.com/lance-armstrong-doping-tour-...
Can you please tell me more? I would love for this to be true, is there evidence for this?
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
[1] https://www.amymyersmd.com/sp/the-thyroid-connection-paperba...
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 WolfThe 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?
There are plenty of other apps out there you can use to track your personal progress that don't have the "social" bit attached.
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
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.
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.
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.
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’m sorry that gave you the wrong impression.
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?
Take your credulous friends to an AA meeting, now and then. It’s basically a workshop against every kind of deception.
> 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.
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)
I also did 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 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 in 55 minutes, less impressive, but still...
Oh! And 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 :-)
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 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.
[1] https://www.omnicalculator.com/sports/cycling-wattage
[2] http://www.creakybottombracket.com/home/2020/1/23/events-the...
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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?
Journalists should learn to use archive.org.
EDIT: Just finished reading. Fine piece of journalism.
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.
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.