In Your Travels

The Great Debate Over The Crash

So since my post about the crash at Turkey Day was questioned on the local listserve, I've done a lot of asking around about the crash and I think I've come up with a consensus so I'm going to talk about that now.

Lots of times if you are leading the pack in a bike race, you are willing to take a pull but you don't want to sit on the front for the rest of your natural life. So you pull off to one side. But sometimes if you are sitting second wheel in a bike race, you don't want to pull through and put yourself into the wind. So when the guy swings off you just follow him. So sometimes he swings wayyyyyy over to one side to try and shake the second wheel. Heck sometimes first wheel will even brake to force second wheel to overshoot a la a fighter pilot move. When these guys start snaking often times then the whole pack follows these two souls.

Now sometimes if you are not having a great race, and you're kind of a bit farther back than you want to be and there are just a few laps to go, you decide to take a calculated risk to move up and get yourself into position for the sprint. So you come up the inside, the place between the edge of the pack and the near curb. Now maybe you've done this before in the very same bike race even in the very same spot and it was no problemo. So maybe the momentum at the front of the pack is stalling a bit and you see some daylight on that inside and there you go. I've done this a bunch of times in my racing career. Usually it will either work and you move up (yay-whee!) or you get shut down and go nowhere (ohhhh darn!). But while it can be nerve racking it is has never had a catastrophic outcome for me, and I don't think I've ever even seen anybody stack it this way. But what can happen is the pack starts switching/snaking right just you make this move into already thin air, and then, Houston, we have a problem.

Now sometimes if you are down the line a bit but still up near the front, you can see this situation is developing, and you know some opportunist is going to take is gutter ball shot. So you jump in and plug the hole before he can pass. This is a defensive tactic on two fronts. One, you keep people from moving up and passing you holding your position, and two you keep them from putting you in position to bump and possibly crash. (Or as my son says 'bump' and 'nonny'.) If you are doing this responsibly you look back to make sure nobody is there yet when you move over. But what if you're in a double file and the pack starts snaking, you have to move over, you're on the inside, and somebody's gutter ball is rolling real real fast between you and the curb, and you've gotta have that space yourself or you're going down?

So this kind of gives you the type of situation as I understand it at Turkey Day. I'm not 100% sure about how things transpired from there but that gives you the basic idea in a general sense. And somewhere along those lines with the moving up going on on one hand, and the switching on the other there was a touch and ka-blamo, John Hebner went down, then Tim Lung went over top of Hebner's bike and went down, and so did about a half dozen other fellas. Mr. Hebner was very unfortunately seriously injured, breaking a collarbone severely, and three ribs. So that is a total, total bummer. He has three kids and I'm sure it is not fun to be in that situation to say the least. I've spent six wheels in a wheelchair followed by six weeks on crutches, and had one other very long period of convalescence involving almost four months on crutches, so nobody has to tell me what that kind of situation is like. BTW the wheelchair gig came from a car crash, and the long crutch time was from a bike wreck, solo, but involving a car.

I'm sure we can all draw some conclusions on this race situation, defintely in a general sense and possibly in a particular sense. Personally, I'm not into trying to pass judgment on anybody because it isn't my job, and I had a distant vantage point at best, just enough to see the pack switching. Some others are trying to place blame. Still others will simply say "That's racing." But I hope the primary lesson will be that almost all of us do not earn our living at this, and even if we do, we have to stay injury free in order to train, and we must train in order to be at our best. Therefore it is incumbent upon us all to consider safety to be the most important consideration when riding our bikes, while we are racing or training, and I hope that is something we can all meditate on, as Sting said, 'How fragile we are.'

posted by Mark @ 6:38 PM