The Hoka Hey Motorcycle Challenge over the summer was purported to be the ultimate Iron Butt competition ride and offered a cool $250,000 to the winner.
It seems that now the top dozen riders, including last year’s winner Will Barclay, have all been disqualified amid allegations of cheating during the race.
Well, now there’s a lot more.
Will Barclay, who won the race for the second time in a row this year, is being denied the $250,000 prize and insiders say that Barclay refused to take a polygraph test as requested by race organizers. For his refusal, the two-time “winner” of the challenge has been banned from future events.
The next 11 finishers traveled to Arizona to receive their payouts and discovered on their arrival that race organizer Jim Durham told them they were all disqualified after he’d reviewed their GPS records and found the top dozen riders had exceeded the speed limit during the challenge.
That’s in direct contravention of the rules.
Following heated negotiations with the riders who finished in the money, organizers reportedly gave the riders $10,000 apiece to cover their expenses. That may sound like serious cash, but consider the fact that the riders were each promised a split of the remaining $250,000 in the prize pool left over after the payout to the winner.
Critics and riders are saying the whole event was a scam from the get-go…