For anyone hopping in now (why is this trending anyway?) and curious as to what these 35 pages are about, a quick TDLR: A non-profit company held a race. Winners were paid handsomely and moved on with their lives. Sometime later they were contacted by the RD (Race Director). He let them know there had been a mistake and winners had been paid twice as much as they should have. He let the recipients know they had three options: 1. Keep 25% and give the rest back. In return, they would be compensated with free race entries in upcoming years. 2. Give it all back, via payment plan if necessary 3. Be taken to court Letsrun debated the subject. Was it a moral issue? Many people weighed in, and as is the case with these cases (See Kip Litton, Alex Viada, etc) many of the defenders of the RD and non-profit looked eerily similar, typed in similar ways, had consistent grammar errors, etc. Then the RD made a post ridiculing "elite runners," calling them entitled babies, etc. This certainly did not help his cause given the demographics of these boards. Back to the issue at hand. The community mostly agreed: The giant checks handed to the runners confirmed the larger prizes. And screenshots of the website showed that the runners were most likely paid the correct amount, although the wording was iffy and possibly open to interpretation. The non-profit company sneakily edited the prize money page to reflect the lower prizes. Letsrunners had a cached version and were able to show this change was made after the fact. After some back and forth, the race director came onto the boards and announced he was accepting blame for the mistakes. The runners would keep their money and he would not pursue legal matters. He apologized for the messy situation, wished everyone a happy holiday and said he was done with the website for good. Shortly after this a rep of the non-profit posted a final official response to the entire situation. They apologized for everything in a well-written, page-long letter. What a nice, tidy, happy ending. Case closed, right? Well, no. You see, earlier in the thread someone by the name of "Ahole elites" had posted a vitriol-filled rant about elite runners. This person must have had an auto-fill username. Because the non-profit's page-long apology was posted under the following username: "Ahole elites." Meanwhile, Runner's World wrote an article on the situation. In that comment section that RD publicly blamed a single, random person for making up accounts to make him look bad. That person took offense, called slander, and said IP would confirm he had never pretended to be the RD. In fact, he would the RD $10,000, to be donated to the charity of his choice, that he had never done such a thing. See below.
The Thread went quiet until this website's co-founder sowed up in the comments to say he had researched the various psedynoms. Guess who almost every poster was? Not Matt, but most likely the Race Director himself, posting under 9 different usernames and oftentimes arguing with himself.
I was only sort of following this thread but decided to take a close look recently.
"Here is what I've found. It's very interesting.
Below a Runner's World article (
http://www.runnersworld.com/races/race-asks-for-some-prize-money-back-then-changes-its-mind), on December 23rd at 2:49 Pacific (4:49 pm CT which is the time that shows up on the LetsRun forum - RW shows the time zone where you are posting from, our forum uses Central Time all the time), the race director Robert Nichols posted in the comments section (where your ID is verified by facebook), "I just posted, its a 2hour time difference for me. Look at the last post that says Hello. Now look at what time this post comes up as."
I went to the messageboard and found the post that many might think he just implied he just made. There was a post from 7 minutes before - at 4:42 CT - from "Adtgy" saying "Hello."
as shown here.
http://www.letsrun.com/forum/f...31#6924556As an administrator, I can click on a button that shows you all of the posts coming from that very same computer (as recorded by cookies). Here is where it gets interesting. That same computer is the one producing ALL 9 of the posts from "Ahole elites" .So no one hijacked 'Ahole elites" even though the posts start out ripping elites and talking about how great the race is to ultimately calling for the race director to be fired. They are all coming from the same computer.
The same computer (according to cookies) also posted a lot of posts defending the race under various names including "CPA", “We have a Winnerâ€, “Funny Manâ€.and "We're all on here" including one where the name Bob Nickles appears to be intentionally misspelled.
"We're all on here"wrote:
I received a call a few days ago from the RD, Bob Nickles. I've participated over the last couple of years also. Nice guy and unfortunately just screwed up his numbers. I sincerely wish that he's not taking this too hard. He's turned a small race into a huge beach run at low tide with thousands participating. Trust me this guy will bounce back and have an even better race next year. They opened registration already and its $16,000 in prize money. It's funny how they listed their prize money, probably over paranoid.That same cookie also posts three times under the name "Rdsurfingmadonna" although most of the "RdSurfingmadonna" posts comes from another computer and different IP address.. The fact that "Ahole elites" and "Rdsurfingmadonna" are posting around the same times could easily be explained by the fact that one is coming from a verizon wireless IP and one from a cox IP. "
So there you have it.