Influencer Matt Choi Took the Blame for 70.3 Texas DQ. For Many People, It’s Too Little, Too Late.

IRONMAN 70.3 Texas took place in Galveston on Sunday and, in the days since, it has become the centre of a hot debate involving running influencer Matt Choi. Choi, racing his first 70.3, crossed the line in an impressive debut time of 5:01:52, only to be immediately disqualified. He was disqualified for “failure to stop” after he was caught drafting on the bike and didn’t pull over to serve his two-minute penalty.

After the race, Choi took to Instagram to apologize, taking full ownership of the mistake and saying he will be back at another IRONMAN event soon. For some people online, this apology was enough, and many people applauded Choi for owning up to the slip-up. For others, however, his apology read as hollow and meaningless, with many people already waiting for him to break the rules again down the road.

Familiar Territory

This may have been Choi’s first time getting disqualified at a triathlon, but it’s far from his first run-in with race officials in general. That’s where the problem lies for so many of Choi’s critics. It’s not that he messed up and didn’t realize he had to pull over, but rather that this is just another infraction in a long pattern he has created in recent years.

The first time Choi really made headlines in the running world was after the Houston Marathon in 2023. He had an impressive sub-three-hour showing that day in Texas, posting a final time of 2:59:35. There was only one problem: he ran under someone else’s name.

Choi faced a lot of scrutiny for this move, as it is not only prohibited in the Houston Marathon rules, but his sub-three finish earned the other runner whose bib he wore on race day a Boston Marathon qualifying time. As marathoninvestigation.com explained at the time, doing this is known as being a “bib mule.” Choi and the friend whose name he ran under were reportedly both banned from the race for two years after this incident.

To his credit, Choi apologized publicly and took full responsibility for this mistake.

“I’d never heard of the term ‘bib mule’ until just a few days ago,” he said in a video after the Houston Marathon. “I didn’t realize that this was a major issue.”

A month after the race in Houston, Choi made the news again, this time at his hometown marathon in Austin, Texas. This time around, he was in trouble for running with two cyclists (one on a regular bike, the other on an e-bike) who were recording him throughout the entire race. Another runner from Austin reached out to marathoninvestigation.com to express their disappointment in Choi and his team’s actions that day.

“[The e-bike] was weaving in and out of runners on the race course, cutting runners off,” this athlete wrote. “I asked both the guy on the electric bike and Matt himself to please get the bike off of the race course and to stop weaving in and out, but this request was ignored.”

In this case, Choi did have permission to have an on-course camera team following him, but he still faced a lot of criticism for affecting the races of other runners in the name of his own content.

Once again, to his credit, Choi apologized publicly and took full responsibility for this disturbance.

“I completely understand the risk of having bikers during a marathon course,” he said in a video after the Austin Marathon. “I apologize if we were in the way of any runners. Our goal was not to block runners or ruin their times.”

Over the next year and a half, Choi didn’t have any issues with race rules, but then, at the 2024 New York City Marathon, came his biggest controversy to date. Once again, Choi brought a crew of e-biking cameramen onto the race course to film him, but, unlike in Austin, race organizers in New York City had not given him permission to do so.

Anthony Chan, a triathlete from San Diego and Slowtwitch contributor, happened to be running in New York that day, leading the three-hour pace group along the race course. Chan has run as a pacer at the NYC Marathon for over a decade, and he says Choi directly impacted himself and the group of runners with him that day in 2024.

“I remember just getting to one of the water stations and his bikes were literally in front of me,” Chan says. “And so I’m like, ‘Okay, well, I’m not getting any water.’ And then there’s like 50 to 150 people behind us following our pacer flags who also can’t get water.”

Chan was far from the only person who noticed Choi that day. Many people complained online. It got to be such a big story that the New York Road Runners (the organization behind the NYC Marathon and many other races) ultimately decided to hit him with a lifetime ban from all of their events.

As is becoming the norm here, to his credit, Choi apologized publicly and took full responsibility for this blunder.

“I have no excuses,” he said in a video after the race. “I was selfish on Sunday […] and it had serious consequences. We endangered other runners. We impacted people going for PBs. We blocked people from getting water. […] For anyone I impacted, I’m sorry.”

It was another heartfelt apology, and Choi received a lot of praise online for being so clearly willing to learn and grow from his mistake.

Then he made the same mistake again.

Less than a year after the NYC incident, Choi raced the Marquette Marathon in Michigan in Sept. 2025. Once again, there were reports of him running alongside and behind a videographer on a one-wheel board. It is unclear whether Choi received permission to have a camera on course with him, but whatever the case, other runners were once again irked by the setup, with one athlete reaching out to marathoninvestigation.com.

“He was definitely weaving in and out of the course [and] near other runners,” the runner wrote. “It was definitely annoying.”

This time, there wasn’t too much uproar online, so Choi didn’t address the issue or apologize publicly. That was his last hiccup before transitioning to triathlon, but it didn’t take long for him to bring controversy to the world of multi-sport racing.

A DQ in Texas

Slowtwitch reached out to Choi for comment, and while he did not respond, he did put his thoughts about the DQ in a post on Instagram. He wrote that he knew he had received a drafting penalty in the moment, but he “ended up missing the penalty zone tent” and thought that two minutes would be added to his final time.

“These are some of the learning curves when doing a new sport and I love it because it shows that I’m a beginner with a lot to learn and this is also a reminder to read the athletes manual,” he continued. (In a separate post, Choi added that he also neglected to attend the athlete briefing before the race.)

Many people accepted this, saying they themselves have made similar mistakes. A friend of his, triathlon coach Natasha Van Der Merwe, even claims part of the blame for the race day mixup, saying she gave Choi a rundown of everything he needed to know about triathlon before his 70.3.

“That’s why I took responsibility [for the DQ], because in that conversation and in a few texts back and forth […] I gave him all the information,” Van Der Merwe says. “I did tell him about the drafting rule for sure, but I didn’t say, ‘Hey, if a penalty does happen, this is what you need to do.'”

One pre-race chat and a few text messages about race strategy and rules was clearly not enough to fully prepare Choi for his first 70.3, which comes as no surprise to his fellow endurance-focused content creator Noel Mulkey. Mulkey is a 14-time IRONMAN finisher and has been a dedicated triathlon content creator for more than 10 years, and he says that “if anyone should read the rules the most, it’s Matt.”

While she wouldn’t put all of the blame on Choi, Van Der Merwe says she does still agree with Mulkey on that note, saying that Choi “should have done that extra due diligence to know the rules,” but she says she thinks critics are taking discussions of this DQ too far.

“This mistake is totally different [than his other ones],” she says “I think everyone should be pissed if he had a camera crew out there or if he stole a bib — if he did the exact same thing that he’s done wrong before. But he did not have those mistakes, he literally made an honest mistake, so this one is just totally different.”

There is a big difference between someone breaking a rule for the first, second or even third time and someone doing it as often or on the same scale as Choi, but Van Der Merwe says there should be no end to the “grace and forgiveness” that Choi receives, no matter how many times he messes up. This is exactly what people like Mulkey take issue with — Choi seems to get a pass time after time.

Mulkey — who, like Choi, has a big platform on social media, with 1.5 million followers on TikTok and another 174,000 on Instagram — has watched Choi for a while now. He has clocked each of Choi’s mistakes along the way, so he says the DQ in Texas really came as no surprise to him. What he says is surprising, however, is Choi’s excuses for the disqualification.

“I’ve gotten a penalty before,” Mulkey says, “and the official told me why I got it and what to do next.”

What to do next, of course, was to go to a penalty tent and serve the time — part of the process that Choi said he was not aware of during the race. Mulkey even points to a friend who raced 70.3 Texas on Sunday who also happened to get a drafting penalty, just like Choi.

“[The official] pulled up, told me I was too close and said to stop at the next tent,” the athlete says. “I even asked her where the next one was and she told me. But, I mean, it’s a big-ass yellow tent with penalty written on the side. It wasn’t complicated.”

Many people seem ready to give Choi one more pass for yet another mistake, but people like Mulkey and Chan ask where it will end — or if it ever will.

“I just think it’s inevitable that this will happen again,” says Mulkey. “He will do the same exact thing somewhere else. Maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but I do think he will do something again, because this is his fourth time. How do you even do that? I’d have to go out of my way to do it that many times.”

Chan says he thinks Choi is capable of growth, but that he needs to redirect his focus a bit if he wants to see actual growth.

“I just think that maybe if we give Matt Choi some grace, we can see that he has confidence,” Chan says. “And I think if he channels that energy and that confidence into doing the right thing like doing the homework and learning the rules, there’s a lot of good that can come out of it and a lot less of the bad.”

Whether Choi deserves another chance or not, he is going to get one at some other race down the line. Hopefully 70.3 Texas will be the last controversial result of his career and he will have a wonderful time in triathlon. He may have several DQs and and a few bans on his resume, but he is still a good athlete, and it would be great to see him post some results where the only things people talk about are his final time and his performance, nothing more.

Tags: