I'm an avid cyclist and this was a fascinating article. Well researched and well written. The author put in a lot of time to track down all the lies, but it sort of glosses over one point.

There had to be a ton of people that knew it was made up and did nothing. Why did't anyone make him put up or shut up?

If I lived within a few hundred miles of his shop, I would have dropped by just to meet him and get something I needed, probably more than once. When I got home I would have looked him up. Not to find a lie but because this is what I do. I meet a new interesting person and I want to dive a little deeper. It makes the experience more satisfying to me when I flesh it out with more details and photos.

A lot of this narrative takes place before everything was online, but I would expect to find some things. Finding nothing outside of the fakeable stuff like LinkedIn I would have dived deeper. The temporary Wikipedia listing would have really lit me up.

Seems to me that a hundred bikers knew about this clown and just let it fly.