This was not a mere "ruined reputation", but rather a persistent, coordinated mobbing assault big enough that not even a professional PR firm could do anything.
Did he cheat? Likely yes. Did he deserve being banned from marathons? Sounds like it. But did he deserve "the pressure, attention, emailing, even trolling" that he got? No, he did not.
If I were in his position, I would have also tried to sue.
What made his conduct outrageous is how he was clinging to his side. He could have just said: “yup, you got me. I had a rough day and made a bad decision.” They would have disqualified his result, maybe banned him in the future races and nothing more would have come from it.
You can’t keep maintaining the unmaintainable and expect people to loose interest. He liked the prestige while he was on the good side of it, and when he turned out to be a cheater he wanted suddenly none of the attention.
You said that a professional PR firm couldn’t help him. Sure enough, turns out it is very hard to rebuild a house while it is actively burning and the owner is pouring more gasoline on it every so often.
They corrode social trust.
I have no sympathy for this person, they're a snake.
Absolutely. It's a lazy, disingenuous way to just try to shut down discussion.
If you really practice this in life, you're going to be taken advantage of.
You're right, discussing it is just stupid. My mistake.
That in no way justifies what he did, at all, but it's not the case that he was an unremitting lowlife. It's a real conundrum, that otherwise wonderful people can sometimes do terrible things.
In related news, Jussie Smollett was sentenced to jail today for faking a race/sex orientation hate crime. (He also claimed the imaginary attackers were politically motivated.)
Many expected him to escape jail time, but he did not. The judge cited Smollett's refusal to accept responsibility (and the resulting harm to society) in making the decision to mandate jail time.
cheating like this denies other participants fruits of their hard labor of many years, just flushes all their effort down the drain. Compare that to just having "the pressure, attention, emailing, even trolling".
What an odd take. Just because throwing money at something doesn’t make it go away does not mean it’s a “big attack” or even that people calling him out are in any way in the wrong. As OP stated the big problem seems to be that he persistently tried to regain his old good reputation instead of accepting defeat. When a cheater wants to continue cheating, it doesn’t matter how much money he throws at PR firms, it’s still fair to call out his cheating.
"Journalists" being paid to get every last bit of scrap on a person, sometimes even going through people's rubbish, breaking laws that protect citizens too, are far more nasty
If you want to call that trolling, I guess you could. The word has changed a lot since I first encountered it over two decades ago.
Trolls can keep it up forever. It’s a labor of love for them, a hobby. I know folks who’ve had multi-year trolls and at least one that escalated to in-person stalking.