Half marathon course cutter Ashley Paulson, who served 6 month contamination suspension, wins coveted Badwater 135.

For the smarter kids of my generation, influencers are a revelation: they are the first to make it clear that the toys we're being sold are garbage, our teachers are phonies, our leaders are fools, our religious counselors are hypocrites, and even our parents are lying to us about damn near everything.

Hahahahahahaha!! This thread is so great !! Very reminiscent of you dorks defending that Meza guy that cheated over and over. She cheated!!! Hahahahahaahaha!!! Come clean beeeeatch!!!!Hahahahahaaha! I wanna see how she gets out of this one . Hey Sally McRae stop hiding and speak up.

When you have no integrity and get called out, why is is the fault of the internet that you kill yourself.

You are failing if that's your goal. if your goal was to make this fizzle, your best bet would be to not "feed the trolls". by bickering with all, you are only making them more fervent.
I'm here for it though.

Damn, Ashley, that was a nice try at a deflection.

Look at the splits. In the last file, her final split after she stopped is skewing the average. Throw that out and her cadence and stride length is consistent with what you’d expect.

- doubler

I’m not going to participate in debate Or speculation on this thread, but thought it was important to reply to that conclusion. Lots of people are looking at those averages and making the same conclusion, but there’s is a short split at the end with 20+ stride length caused by signal jumping around after she stopped that throws the average out of whack.

I thought you’d retired?

also, I don’t believe anything this woman says.
Once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is a pattern….a pattern of happy accidents. she’s the luckiest unlucky person ever.

I'm good with Ashley's explanation at this point. A) She appears to have the engine to pull off such a performance, based on, among other results, the OTQ marathon. B) She is basically a professional exerciser (she gets paid to exercise for hours a day), so she's presumably got the endurance to do it. C) She almost immediately provided GPS data, rather than holding out.

It almost defies logic, at least to me, that an entire team of people would conspire to cheat the way it would need to have happened. I'm going with Occam's Razor here and say it most likely would not happen.

Presumably she'll face more scrutiny at future races based on the exceptional split she ran to set the course record.

This is what your arguments look like when you always fall back on race or gender. No need to address the issue, just call the other a newb. Of course Latoya can't be wrong, she black and a woman. Believe Women!

At least she had the courage to ask directly- and in a decently respectful way- instead of continuing the behind the scenes gossip. This runner has worked tirelessly, failed multiple times to get to the level she's achieved. It looks like she respects the sport and wants to make sure others do as well.

Agreed.

My screen name should make it clear how I feel about cheats. I'm all for the Race Director getting to the bottom of this, and if he won't or can't then I'm all for crowdsourcing the effort to discover "smoking gun" proof (like we did with Frank Meza).

But the burden of proof is on the accusers and at this point they are woefully short of proving anything.

Her previous incidents might speak to character but they offer nothing relative to this race result.

On the other hand, her known results from big, well-monitored races would support that this result is in the realm of possibility.

The Garmin data supports her case and the few blips in the data are explainable and logical (as posters have noted in detail).

The doppleganger is strange but at this point is proof of nothing. Find a photo of the other woman running in her place or you have nothing.

If you want to prove she cheated, stop posting and roll up your sleeves and find some proof. You aren't there yet. Not by a long shot.

Next Director of USAT!? :) I guess the thing that bothers me the most is that if you are a pro vying for the world record AND you have doping/cutting in your past, wouldn't you want nearly every step of this on 4K video, let alone the top biometric/gps recorders available (with a backup...). How much could that possibly cost vs. the ROI of not having it questioned the rest of your life!?

It isn't her job, or any other athletes, to prove that they ran a course. The burden is on others to prove that they didn't.

I also think we put far too much emphasis on technology, and expect it to be flawless. For the last race that I did, I have no data at all because my GPS couldn't connect before the gun was fired. To expect someone to run 135 miles without some tech glitch is silly.

All seems incredibly fishy to me. I don’t think being a 2:44 marathoner means she can crush the best guys that ever ran the course. Come on. Once a cheater…

And for all the folks jumping on the fact that her data says "edited," when you change the setting from private to public, that is an edit.

2:40:07 at the Trials. 44th place. Use Google if you have to, but at least give her credit for that.

OK, by your logic I guess she shouldn't have bothered with the watch then? I'm just saying that from her perspective, if you were honestly going for a WORLD RECORD, and you know it is going to be heavily scrutinized, maybe it would be nice to be able to say "I have footage of every step, so you best stfu!"?

No, that isn't my logic at all. She had many reasons to bother with wearing a watch.

My logic is that a race watch is not intended to prove that you ran a race. It is intended to provide meaningful data to the wearer, including time of day, miles completed, pace, heart rate, etc. They can use that during the race to pace themselves and after the race to analyze performance.

She has no obligation to share the data. She chose to do so anyway. Thus far, every aspect of the data supports her story. It is normal that the watch could need charging while she plugged away for 17 minutes without it. The fact that it says "edited" can be explained by the fact that she changed it from private to public.