Chinese influencer Sun Yuanyuan has lost her sports sponsorship after she was caught hitching a ride on the back of a bicycle during the Berlin Marathon.
Sun, a content creator with more than half a million followers, rode a bicycle for part of the race in late September before posing with her finisher medal and boasting about achieving a personal best time.
After her cheating was exposed, she lost her sponsorship from Brooks China. Brooks is an American company that designs high performance running shoes and apparel, and it frequently partners with prominent athletes and internet personalities to market its products.
The Berlin Marathon is one of the six World Marathon Majors and takes place annually in the German capital. The event draws tens of thousands of participants to its flat and fast course, making official entries highly coveted among runners globally.
Sun addressed her 530,000 followers on RedNote. The platform, also known as Xiaohongshu, operates similarly to Instagram by allowing users to share photographs, videos and lifestyle recommendations with a vast audience.
"This was an extremely dishonest act," she wrote. "I feel deeply guilty about this."
"My opportunistic act was a sign of disrespect towards fair competition and the spirit of the marathon," she added. "I offer my sincere apologies to everyone."
Sponsorships and fake times
The creator explained that she jumped on the bicycle after feeling unwell during the race. She admitted she hid her illness and chose to post about her running success anyway.
Her case highlights a growing trend of social media personalities fabricating race results. The Official Marathon Time Integrity Unit (OMTUI), a dedicated body that exposes runners telling fibs about their running times, has revealed dozens of cases of dishonesty over the past year.
The organisation noted a major theme involves athletes falsely claiming they have broken the prestigious three-hour barrier.
Instead of sharing their official race time, these athletes often post cropped times from the fitness tracking app Strava to hide their true results. Strava is an internet service widely used by millions of runners and cyclists globally to record their physical exercise and share their workouts on a social network.
GPS drift and skipped miles
Strava relies on satellite signals to track a runner's path and distance. However, the application can suffer from GPS drift when signals bounce off tall city buildings. This interference misrepresents the actual distance a user has covered.
This technological quirk means the app may tell runners they have completed the full marathon distance before they actually cross the official finishing line. The discrepancy can amount to multiple minutes, allowing athletes to post the flawed data online and claim the credit.
The OMTUI has also accused other prominent creators of faking their runs. An influencer known as gingerjmduff on Instagram was accused of skipping 10 kilometres of a race after financial technology company Revolut invited him to compete.
"You have accepted a sponsored entry through a brand partner for one of the world's most sought-after marathon places, only to leave the official course at approximately 22km, rejoin around the 32km mark, skipping a significant portion of the race," the unit wrote.
"The issue here is... accepting a place that hundreds of thousands of runners would dream of [without] having any intention of completing the race, then posing with a finisher's medal reserved for those who actually finish," the body added.
Further cases of fabricated times have emerged in Italy. During a half-marathon in Naples, an influencer named Corrado Ciamei was rumbled for posting an inaccurate Strava time. A detailed look into his uploaded data revealed he claimed to have completed one kilometre of the race in just 52 seconds.
