A Chinese Fitness Influencer Admits She Rode a Bike for Part of the Berlin Marathon

Sun Yuanyuan slowed a little with every 5K through the first 20 kilometers of the Berlin Marathon on Sept. 27, the way plenty of runners in the back half of a big-city field do, and between 30K and 35K she was moving at 7:23 per kilometer. The next 5K went by in 30:49, or 6:10 per kilometer, quicker than any other stretch of her race and more than a minute per kilometer faster than the one before it. That is the part of the course where she was photographed sitting on the back of a bicycle, and she has since admitted riding it.

Sun is a Chinese fitness influencer who posts as Abeeeer on Rednote (Xiaohongshu), where she has more than half a million followers. She crossed the line in an official 4:53:46 and shared the time after the race as a personal best. The photo from near 38K, alongside her split data, was posted on Oct. 1 by the Official Marathon Time Integrity Unit, an Instagram account started in 2025 that checks what runners claim against their chip times. CBC News has since confirmed with Brooks that the shoe company ended its relationship with her.

In an apology posted on Rednote on Oct. 3, Sun said riding the bike had broken the race rules and that she would offer no defense of it. “Even if I felt physically unwell on the course, that is absolutely no reason for me to break the rules,” she wrote, in Marathon Handbook’s translation of the Chinese. She also admitted keeping it quiet: “When I shared the race publicly afterward, I deliberately concealed this fact. That was a very dishonest act.” A note above the post says an earlier version of the apology was reported and hidden by the platform and that she has appealed. By Wednesday it had drawn more than 4,000 comments. Her other posts about Berlin have been taken down, according to CBC.

Brooks China, which had supplied her race gear, announced on Oct. 4 that it had cut ties and ruled out working with her in future, and it was candid about its own part in the affair. The company said it knew her training plan and goal for Berlin before the race, and that afterward it checked her finishing result and the photos and video she provided but did not look closely at the race as a whole, the split data in particular. It called that an oversight on its part and apologized to runners, customers and anyone else following the story.

What Her Splits Show

These are Sun’s checkpoint times from the official results.

*The results list the 25K time as estimated.

Nothing else on the page comes close to that 6:10. Her 35K-to-40K split was 2:38 quicker than even her opening 5K, run on fresh legs, and it followed a 5K at 7:23 per kilometer, the same pace she had held from 15K to 20K. If she had kept up 7:23 per kilometer as far as 38K, the last two kilometers to the 40K mat would have taken about 8:40, a pace of roughly 4:20 per kilometer, which she came nowhere near at any other point. Over the final 2.2K she was back to 6:59 per kilometer. On paper, it all adds up to a second half of 2:24:50 against a first half of 2:28:56, a negative split of 4:06 from a runner who had slowed through every 5K of the first 20K.

Her Result Is Still Official

As of Wednesday, the Berlin results still list Sun, bib 80121, as a finisher in 4:53:46, placing her 37,585th overall, 11,728th among women and 2,308th in her age group. At the front of the race that day, Guye Adola won the men’s race in 2:02:50 and Tigst Assefa set a women’s course record of 2:11:04. CBC said the race had not responded to its questions, and no sanction has been announced.

New York Road Runners took a hard line with the Austin influencer Matt Choi in 2024, disqualifying him from the New York City Marathon and banning him from all future NYRR races after his brother and videographer followed him on e-bikes. In China, organizers of the 2018 Shenzhen half-marathon punished 258 runners, most of them caught on traffic cameras cutting through bushes to skip a U-turn. Twenty-one were banned for life for wearing fake bibs or using a stand-in, and the rest for up to two years.

After the 2001 race, Berlin’s own organizers disqualified 74 runners who had taken the subway, ridden bikes or skipped parts of the course, and struck their names from the results.