[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.

[rdiddly]

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]

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.