A video revealing weights inside bass caught in a fishing competition in Ohio went viral.
Chase Cominsky and Jake Runyon lost out on their title and $5,000 in prize money at the Lake Erie Walleye Trail Championship in Cleveland’s Gordon Park in Ohio after their catch was discovered to be stuffed with weights and what appeared to be additional walleye fillets, according to the Daily Mail.
“We got weights in fish!” tournament Director Jason Fischer said after the fish were gutted, per the report. Cominsky and Runyon’s catch weighed 33 pounds, almost double the weight of their closest rival’s catch.
The video showed others reacting to the news as one official cut open every fish. A crowd gathered around the basket of fish and Runyon, who stood there wordless as others shouted profanities at him.
MARYLAND MAN SETS RECORD WITH 77-POUND LONG-FIN TUNA CATCH
Serious Controversy in Pro fishing tournament as multiple-time winners caught stuffing lead weights and other fish filets in their fish to have the heaviest catch to win hundreds of thousands in prizes. pic.twitter.com/Sxqeo2XC0K
— Billy (@Billyhottakes) October 1, 2022
Both Runyon and Cominsky have been removed from the Walleye Slam’s live leader board, despite winning the competition in 2021. That same year, the pair would go on to win the Blaster Walleye Fall Brawl and the Walleye Slam fishing derbies, earning some $306,000 in prize winnings.
This pair failed a lie detector test in late 2021 in connection to the Fall Brawl. At the time, they claimed they would legally contest the lie detector results because they had passed a lie detector test for the Walleye Slam derby.
This recent revelation led many at the competition to suspect that the fisherman had been cheating all along.
“You got thousands of f***ing dollars you stole from everyone,” one man is heard yelling in the video. Others called for them to refund their winnings.
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More than 2,000 fisherman are featured in the competition, which only costs $35 to register.
“I just genuinely care about running an honest tournament,” Fischer said in a statement, per WKYC, “and Lake Erie anglers deserve it.”
