This much is confirmed: Nick Clark is Australian, a road bike enthusiast and former owner of a bike store in the USA. When he once again - in his mid-40s - records a best time on a mountain route on Strava, some Strava users become suspicious and start asking questions. These were the first cracks in the façade that would completely crumble over the following months.

The Australian online magazine Cyclingtips unravels the story of the gifted impostor in great detail. Author Iain Treloar writes that he spent more than a year researching, talking to dozens of people, female athletes, representatives of UCI teams, companies, universities, army units - people who know Clark or should know him if his version of the story is true. It turns out that it's not so easy to prove someone is lying when the false facts lie twenty years or more in the past.

Life as a role play: professional cyclist, CEO, soldier, PhD student ...

The fact that Nick Clark claims to have become Australia's U23 national time trial champion in a year when the country had not yet awarded any U23 titles in this discipline is one of the easier claims to refute. Membership lists of cycling teams in the nineties are more complicated. In between, the Australian also invents a career as a downhill and motocross rider. The deeper the author descends into his biography, which has changed again and again over the years, the more contradictions emerge, overlapping alleged military missions (UN peacekeeping mission in Cambodia) with university studies in the USA and World Tour cycling races in Europe. Treloar went to the trouble of investigating almost every entry in Clark's various CVs in order to either confirm or falsify them.

The journalist has written a lengthy but fascinating feature (reading time approx. one hour) about the supposed professional cyclist, who was actually CEO of a listed company with fictitious university degrees, but whose military career has not been confirmed. As a bike store owner (true), he founds a women's cycling team (true), which is supplied with bikes by Colnago. It later transpires that he paid for the 10,000+ dollar racing bikes himself. The fact that Clark, as a coach, is said to have hurt individual female athletes with aggressive behavior and even bullying is a story in itself. Yet he has enough to contend with in his own life.

In the best Anglo-Saxon narrative style, Iain Treloar works out that Clark's web of lies has a tragic background and at the same time fits in with the times in which he continues to spin it. Coincidence or not: the Australian begins to fudge his biography in the same year that Donald J. Trump wins the presidential election. As is well known, he has maintained an alternative approach to facts to this day.