Thanks for filling in the back-story and technical detail on these videos, Luke. I wasn’t aware of Willy’s previous faked videos, so when I saw the two badly-filmed shots of his first 8 club qualify claim, my attitude was that since he was clearly at least close to achieving it, I could give him the benefit of the doubt at a personal level. But despite that, the video was clearly insufficient evidence for a (matched) world record, and such a significant one at that. So when he later posted an adequately filmed successful qualify I was pleased for him.
I remembered Alex Barron’s claim (which I did and still do believe) to have qualified 11 balls, witnessed by no less a juggler than Peter Bone, only to find the camera had fallen over. And if I remember correctly, it took going on for two years until Alex repeated the achievement, this time on camera. Quite rightly, I don't recall either Alex or Peter expecting people to consider the first time as anything other than a plausible claim without sufficient evidence for a world record.
I imagine Alex felt pretty disappointed about that camera failure for all that time, so it was nice not to see Willy suffer for long in the same way. And then it turns out he was lying about the first time. Of course, I’m taking your explanation of how he faked those videos at face-value, but it rings true. Willy or others could, in theory, provide evidence disproving your conclusions, and I and others might change our minds. That’s the great thing about publically available evidence. But I don’t expect that to happen in this case.
This all seems a bit like drugs in sport to me. Once someone has been caught doping once, you can never quite look at their subsequent achievements in the same way. People calling out the dopers are too often criticised for lack of faith. But they are necessary, just as it’s necessary to call out fake vidoes – thank you.
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Post by ChrisD
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