Matthew Choi’s showing at Sunday’s New York City Marathon may be his last.
The 29-year-old influencer from Texas finished Sunday’s marathon in 2:57:15, but he was disqualified late Monday night after he ran most of the course with two people keeping pace with him on electric bikes while filming him. He is no longer listed in the official results.
“After a review and due to violations of World Athletics rules, and New York Road Runners’ Code of Conduct and Rules of Competition, NYRR has disqualified Matt Choi from the 2024 TCS New York City Marathon and removed him from the results,” an NYRR spokeswoman said in a statement to Front Office Sports. “He has been banned from any future NYRR races.”
In an Instagram post Tuesday morning, Choi apologized for his actions, fully put the blame on himself, and said he won’t appeal the decision. He said he found out he was banned from future events in an email to NYRR last night and acknowledged it wasn’t the first time he was warned about filming with e-bikes during a marathon; he promised it would be the last.
“I was selfish on Sunday to have my brother and my videographer follow me around on the course on e-bikes and it had serious consequences,” Choi said in his video. “We endangered other runners, we impacted people going for [personal bests], we blocked people from getting water, and with the New York City Marathon being about everyone else and about the community, I made it about myself.”
Choi has more than 405,000 followers on his Instagram account and more than 465,000 on TikTok, where he regularly posts running content. He hosted an NYRR panel the day before the marathon.
Every year the NYRR releases a list of prohibited items at the marathon and this year’s included selfie sticks and “any camera mount or rig that isn’t attached directly to the head or torso.” Videos on social media show two people filming Choi while riding rented e-bikes on the crowded course. Choi did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Choi’s entourage drew heavy scrutiny on social media, where it was the subject of multiple Reddit threads for impacting other runners on the course. The top liked comment on one of Choi’s Instagram posts from the marathon has more than 4,100 likes and chides him for his decision.
“I honestly don’t understand why you need a film crew to film you while running a marathon,” one representative commenter wrote. “You’ve completely lost touch with reality. It’s everyone’s race and you’re clearly impacting others by doing that.”
It’s not the first time Choi has brought a film crew with him in the middle of a race. In early 2023 he was filmed by a crew on e-bikes at the Austin Marathon; he may have done the same in May at the NYRR’s Brooklyn Half Marathon.
“My media crew does their best job at staying out of the way of the runners,” Choi said in a 2023 TikTok after the Austin incident. He claimed he had permission to have cyclists on the course and claimed that criticizing his content would hurt the sport. “The intent of my content has always been around raising awareness around the sport of running,” he said at the time. “If we can’t show elements of running, especially competition day, it won’t continue to grow to new audiences.”
Runna, an app that offers personalized running plans, dropped Choi as an ambassador in light of his disqualification.
“Our ethos and entire mission is about inspiring and supporting runners around the world on and off the race course, and so we are deeply uncomfortable with what happened on Sunday,” a Runna spokesperson said in a statement to FOS. “We’ve also since found out that Matt has done this before which was not something that we knew about and which was an oversight on our part – we are going to improve our ambassador screening processes as a result.”
