- William Goodge crossed finish line in Sydney on May 19
- Has now been hit by allegations – and not for the first time
British model turned endurance athlete William Goodge celebrated when he completed his 3800km run from Perth to Sydney in just 35 days on May 19 – but now, not even a week later, he is mired in allegations that he cheated.
The former semi-professional rugby player from Bedfordshire began his journey at Cottesloe Beach on April 15 and reached his target of slogging through some of Australia’s most inhospitable country in just 35 days.
The 31-year-old began running in 2018 to process his mother’s cancer diagnosis, telling the Daily Mail that ‘running helped me to deal with my demons’.
Since that time, the popular endurance athlete has taken on many challenges, including becoming the fastest Englishman to run across the USA, raising thousands for cancer research in the process.
He broke Australian runner Chris Turnbull’s world record by four days after averaging more than 100km per day at about seven and a half minutes per kilometre.
Ultra-endurance runners usually upload data from body-worn devices to show how they have progressed, and Goodge was no different on his incredible journey.
William Goodge is pictured celebrating after running from Perth to Bondi Beach in just 35 days, breaking a world record
The 31-year-old endurance athlete (pictured) averaged more than 100km a day on the journey
He used a Garmin InReach satellite communicator and his location, speed and other metrics like heart rate were measured using the Strava exercise app.
Strava users who examined his data during the run said Goodge ran 400 metres in just 23 seconds on April 16, the second day after he left Cottesloe.
That compares to the current 400m men’s world record of 43.03 seconds, set by South Africa’s Wayde van Nierkerk at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Skeptics have picked up on that remarkable piece of data to back up their accusations against Goodge, but the data could also be unreliable or outright incorrect due to difficulties caused by sending the data from such a remote location.
Canadian Running magazine noted that the heart rate data from Goodge’s body-worn devices was frequently at 100 to 105 beats per minute, calling that ‘shockingly low for 14+ hour days in a harsh climate’.
Goodge has hit back at the allegations.
‘I knew it was gonna come,’ he told the ABC.
‘I was prepared for that and just, it comes with the territory. And you can’t blame people for coming at you and questioning your stuff.
‘It’s just part and parcel of it.’
Goodge (pictured) has hit back at allegations that some of the data he recorded on his 3800km cross-country slog doesn’t add up
He added that he and his team made the record-setting run as transparent as possible by uploading the data and putting up a live tracker so anyone who wanted to come and watch him on the road could have done so at any time.
Accusations like these are nothing new for Goodge.
He has even tried to catch Goodge in the act of cheating by flying to the States to confront the athlete on his run from Los Angeles to New York in 2023, but he found no evidence.
‘Yes, Goodge is a good-looking guy, and he’s making a lot of money. But what appalls me is he is taking a lot of money away from the more deserving international athletes out there,’ Cockerell told The Times.
Other runners have also expressed skepticism, including well-known ultrarunner Rob Pope, who told The Times that he hopes Goodge’s records are genuine, but his ‘heart rate doesn’t make sense’.
William Cockerell, a veteran long-distance runner and sportswriter based in the UK, has spent years claiming that Goodge’s stats are too good to be true and has accused him of ‘watch muling’ – a form of cheating where that involves sharing a GPS device between runners.
