A social media health influencer in China is underneath fireplace this week after she used a fake bib to run at the Chinese Half-Marathon Championships in Sichuan final Sunday. The lady was caught when the fake bib was discovered to be an identical to that of one other participant, which resulted in her disqualification and a lifetime ban from the race.
The influencer, Liao Xingxing, was in a position to begin and end the race with out anybody noticing. However, by Tuesday, a video on Chinese TikTookay (Douyin) surfaced of her carrying the identical bib quantity as one other entrant. The clip confirmed two runners with the identical bib quantity (C4567), which Liao (in pink) was suspected of “cloning.” To make issues worse, the girl simply occurred to be a web based health influencer with 15,000 followers.
In response to the video, Liao defined that she didn’t win the lottery to get into the race, so she was given the bib by one in all her followers. According to a report from China’s VCT News, she had no concept her bib quantity overlapped with another person’s, and believes one in all her anti-fans tricked her.
A suspicious a part of the story is that pictures of each runners and their bib numbers have been taken, which might help Liao’s argument. Either method, the organizing committee of the Meishan Renshou Half Marathon didn’t consider Liao’s story, and reacted with harsh punishment, saying they believed she had printed her personal bib quantity. The incident was additionally reported to the Chinese Athletics Association, which might lead to further punishment.
The Meishan Renshou Half Marathon is China’s first World Athletics Platinum Label half-marathon occasion, and serves because the nation’s nationwide half-marathon championship. Each 12 months, organizers obtain greater than 150,000 purposes to run the race, with lower than 10 per cent of runners accepted.
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Since the incident, Liao has deactivated her social media accounts and deleted all her movies and feedback concerning the race. She had posted a complete of 361 movies on Douyin, which obtained 219,000 likes, most of them associated to working.
In the previous few months, there have been a number of different instances in China the place runners used completely different bib numbers for races and have been disciplined for it. At the 2025 Standard Chartered Marathon in Hong Kong, 4 Chinese runners within the males’s 10K and half-marathon races have been stripped of their wins for swapping their bibs, although it was unintended. All 4 athletes have been linked to the identical athlete supervisor, who distributed the bibs to the flawed athletes.