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

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

#51

Post by analog31 »

FDSGSG wrote: post #16
ck2 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's the big problem with doping anyway? Even now, everyone is doping, it doesn't seem to be causing huge problems. Wouldn't it be safer for everyone if it was all out in the open?

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.

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

#52

Post by hackflip »

cyberpanther wrote: post #32

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'm always loading my bike/skis/etc into my car after a ride and forgetting to turn off Strava for the drive home.

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

#53

Post by nradov »

notacoward wrote: post #50
cyberpanther wrote: post #32

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.

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 c…

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.

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

#54

Post by bombcar »

freedomben wrote: post #46
bombcar wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the duties of parents is to call out bullshit privately for their children so they can also learn the distinction.

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 s…

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.

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

#55

Post by pessimizer »

cycomanic wrote: post #5
ck2 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 >…

> Baseball has had plenty of steroid abuse,

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.

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

#56

Post by stereocodes »

nradov wrote: post #53
notacoward wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

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.

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

#57

Post by notacoward »

nradov wrote: post #53
notacoward wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

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.

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.

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

#58

Post by pards »

pikma wrote: post #19
abdel_nasser wrote: post #7

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 lie…

> 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?

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

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

#59

Post by doogerdog »

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.

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

#60

Post by iab »

mikeodds wrote: post #39
ilamont wrote: post #38

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 backg…

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
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