joshe236

Sorry if this one is long.

My worst accident happened in January this year. At Oleta Park in Miami, FLorida, they opened up a new trail, it was a downhilling one. There was one part of the hill that went down about 50 ft. like at 45 degree angle, at the bottom of the hill it went back up about 7 ft. where people could get "air". Where the hill went back up there is on the right a little lip, which adds about half a foot. All during winter my friends and I would do nothing but practice getting air on this lip. One sunday, there was a lot of people there, a lot of bikers too, they were all getting massive air, 5 ft, etc. So I guess I got a little bit cocky, and when I went down my 3rd time, ( Peddling as hard as I can), made up over the lip, got massive air, (They said I got at least 5 ft.) The bike was perfect until the landing.
I landed on my back wheel first then my first, but my front shock bottomed out, I lost my chain, my front wheel made a little hole in the ground, and I start skidding all the way from the left to the right, off the side of the hill. The right side of my body is skidding while my bike was on my left, as I skidded down the side of the hill, which was full of rocks. I finally came to a stop hitting a log on the ground. I pushed my bike off me, and I got up, I was so confused I didn't notice the damage I took. I walked over to a bench and sat down, I noticed my right elbow was bleeding like crazy. Threw my ice-cold camelbak onto it, hurting soo much. After a couple of minutes, I picked up damaged bike and just rode to the parking lot, thank god it wasn't that far away. Called my parents and they came 5 mins later, My dad as wound care expert quickly took a hose and watered down my elbow. That was the end of that accident.

My total damage was: A big gash on my elbow about 6 inches all the way around, couple of slashed on my shoulder and on my arse. Couldn't go biking or use my right arm for 3 1/2 months. The major damage to my bike, was the front shock (RST 281R). My bike is a Mongoose MGX GRX 6.5.
Now whenever I go bike riding, I wear full body armor. and that's my story. Sorry if it was long....

Bsktball55

My worst crash so far happened about 6 months ago. My friends and I were riding on a trail they were a little ahead of me because my bike kept breaking so I was trying to catch up I went down into a little revine and my shocks which were a piece of crap rebounded so hard I went off the trail and hit a small tree trunk. My front tire completely tacoed and I went flying I know I did at least two flips before landing flat on my back. It took me a minute to figure out where I was. I started carrying my bike since it no longer roled and about 1/4 mile up the trail I met up with my friend who was also carrying his bike, he had done the exact some thing. The worst part was the day before I had taken a nose dive out of my lofted bed (it was about 6 feet in the air) needless to say my roomates got a kick out of that, it took them 10 minutes to stop laughing. It took a month to live down my two days of clumsyness. I was just lucky that I didn't hurt myself.

john999

Worst accident, not very bad -

Hit a branch on the side of the road, went flying over, thinking 'well, isn't this just dandy', twisted in the air and ploughed into the ground.
Hit on my side, scraped skin off side of my face and broke my arm (no helmet).

Stupidest :

Riding along, got a mosquito in my eye, so I closed both my eyes.
Opened it just in time to see the kerb.

russhawk

hey all, thanks for replying to this thread. I just had a new story to add today, I was riding our wonderful riverwalk area, it's a mile wide, but have to ride several miles to get there, but it simulates a good off road track. So here I am pedaling along, two way hot teenyboppers are walking along the path coming towards me(knew they were there, saw the car at the front of the walk), so I crowd over off the path, riding over a bunch of dead leaves, when I just clip the edge of a hidden branch, and it flies up an tags my calf muscle. Now in my neck of the woods here in kansass, we have some very big pissed off rattlers that hide in this stuff, and I have encountered them before. So just thinking that I was struck by grand-daddy poppa rattler, I freaked out, lost control on the slick leaves, and crashed and burned. All this occured right in front of those girls. I did get some road rash, and a good size hole from the branch clipping me, but the best medicine I got was when the women dropped me off, one stayed with me to help me get cleaned up, hehe, well, the rest I'll keep to myself, but all I will say is she just left a very happy girl.

russhawk

I meant to say the walk path was a mile long, not wide, sorry if this cnfused ya.

Spire

Worst accident : I was going down a hill at the same speed as traffic about 3-4 meters behind a car, in the evening, the traffic light at the bottom turned red, and the guy without inidcationg hit the brakes hard and swerved right, hitting me and knocking me over. He stopped in the distance, as I stood up, he drove off. I tried to chase him, but my chain was caught in the front derailleur (took 20seconds to get out, he was gone)

poululla

A drunk driver struck me from behind with his car and trailer..... that about says it all. Somehow I survived this, thanks to a good helmet and a great deal of luck.

orguasch

at the hands of my wife, just kidding hehehehe

ONEN

Chronological order:

~7yrs
Thinking I'ma BMX star, I launch myself off the top of a school wall. A high one, taller than I was at the time. I think I must've been watching to much E.T & thought I could just magically fly up in the air before landing beautifully. In actuality- my little legs couldnt peadal fast enough, so I basically drove off the edge of a 5` wall. It must've looked hilarious from the third person, but I thought I was going to die. Didnt actually get too hurt, just brusies & gravel cuts, but it put me off BMX's.

~10 yrs. My first racer (£5 pawn shop special, must've been good! ). After about a year of using it as a mountain bike in my local rivers/shale pits/woods & throwing it around with very little respect for its age, I managed to bend the forks by bumping a kerb & turning. The bike didnt go up the kerb, since the fork took the shock, so the bike rolled back.

I tried to balance it swinging the front round, but the forks had bent so much that the wheel hit the frame & I collapsed onto the road, managing to skillfully land my elbow on a drain cover. Didnt break anything, but the pain was quite exquisite to say the least.

~10 years. On my new (yellow) pawn shop racer I come screaming down this super-steep brae, where I've been showing off my tire-shredding skids to the local girls. This time, though, I had a plastic botle in my rear (to make it sound like a motorbike ) which jammed the callipers & left me hurtling into a thornbush twice my height (front brake didnt work). Probably the fastest I'd ever gone in my life, too. Gave me an interesting complexion.

When I was 15 I bought my first real bike ( a heavy chromo MTB)which gave me lots of interesting low-speed falls until I moved to Edinburgh... where it was stolen.

Oh, well. Now I'm after a road bike again. I seemed to have more fun with them

bikehard700

This was about ten years ago...
I was riding to work in the morning, about 13 miles, and about 4 miles from work, I was cruising down a hill at about 25-30 mph, and an elderly women made a right turn, crossing my path. I hit the brakes, but could not slow down before hitting her right rear quarter panel, going over the trunk, landing in the street on my head with my feet still in the pedals and above me, then rolling off to the side and finally sliding to a stop. At which point I jumped up yelling and screaming at this poor women who was so upset she was shaking. Once we both settled down, we exchanged info and I went on to work... then I went to the hospital to have them sew up the hole in my elbow, and I took off my helmet and saw the surface was severly scratched (and saved me from severe injury). My neck was sore for about a week, but no major damage. I did go back to work for the day.
My ride home after work was much less exciting, and the women called me at home that evening, we had a nice talk, and she replaced the rear deraileur that was not shifting well after the crash.

Chris L

Sept 1995. I was riding along not concentrating and ran into a big rock on the road. Net result, bike flew in the air (as did I), bike lands on me at exactly the same time I hit the ground. Not much fun I can tell you.

Oct 2001. Took a roundabout way too fast in the wet. Lost the back wheel, landed head first, bounced and eventually skidded away on my backside. My helmet saved me from far worse things than the eventual road rash.

stephensnow40

Well you see one time when I was a little younger I took my friends bike for a ride and noticed a grand pile of dirt. So something exciting to the young mind happened and I become magnetically attracted to this pile of dirt I WANTED TO FLY IT!!!
So i took off down a steep incline and was quickly coming more and more close to my attraction, when I finally reached it glorious feeling raced through my body I then hit the pile thinking i was going to fly like super man but instead my fron wheel stuck striaght into the pile I think because of some certian scientific law wanted to keep going in that direction so my Crotch are was drove into the nice metal screw filled handle bars and I keeled over sprawling around with flailnig limbs crying and wondering what the hell just happened. When I finally got up and walked back to my house I checked IT out and man it was quite a mess
one of the scariest accidents I have ever came upon in my entire life.

xlr8rbmx

Riding trails yesterday. Broke my wrist.. again

-bs

bac

Every time I think of this, I cringe a bit, but here goes:

I was riding the road down a very steep two-lane hill about 5 miles from my house. I ran out of gear, so I was in my tuck position. I noticed in my mirror that 4 cars were coming up on me. I was over to the right of the road as far as safety would allow. The next thing I felt was my bike jumping out from underneath me (most probably tapped by one of the aforementioned cars), and I was on the pavement sliding and rolling @ a terrifying rate of speed. It’s true what people say about it all happening in slow motion. I remember having time to think to myself as I skidded along the road, leaving little chunks of me along the way … man, this is going to hurt a lot.

I was VERY fortunate in that I walked away from this incident with only stitches, road rash and a bad attitude toward my fellow man. The last car in line stopped and told me that while I was sliding down the road, one of the other cars just missed running me over. He then took my bleeding carcass to the hospital. He was the only one to stop, and the others HAD to see the crash.

Anywho, after a trip to the ER and 32 days of healing, I once again mounted my scoot. I remember feeling fortunate to be alive and riding that day.

kobyj

When I am riding on campus, I will sometimes try to out run cars. This one time about 3 years ago, my front tire was worn pretty well and was low on air. The backpack on my back probably didn't help the balance of the bike either. As I came around a turn, the bike just dropped out from under me and before I knew it, I was sliding down the road. I had the presence of mind to kick the bike away from me and to roll onto my back so that the backpack would take the brunt of the road. I figure I slid about 10 feet on the road. The bike ended up 15 feet beyond me.

I got up with no pain. Told the eye witnesses I was fine (most of them were girls ), picked up the bike, fixed the twisted handlebars, and hopped back on. About the time I got to my dorm room was when the pain hit. I found I had nice road rash on both my knees, my elbow, and somehow on my hip. The shorts didn't have any holes in them though! To this day, I don't know how I got road rash through a pair of shorts.

The bottom bracket actually detached from the frame a few weeks later. I think that when the pedals hit the road, the welds cracked on the down tube and the seat post tube. It is a wierd feeling when the pedals drop out from under you and go beneath the rear tire.

NIBYAK

:thumbup: It was five or six years ago on the Mount Vernon Bike Path in Northern Virginia. I was riding my relatively new purple Cannondale frame with brand new wheels. It was beautiful evening and I was just cruising home after a nice long ride. About two or three miles from home as I was going down a gentle curving hill it happened. In my lane was a young woman coming right at me. We made eye contact and I got as far right as I could, and figured all was well so I let off of the brakes and proceeded ahead. At the last possible instant she veered to her left directly in front of me and it happened. My shiny aluminum bike met her shiny steel bike head-on. Both legs of the fork sheered off, the front wheel had a hole in the rim and the rear wheel was just bent about six different ways. When I came to I noticed that my new front wheel was only attached to the bike by my computer wire. My helmet had a new and interesting hole in it and I was bleeding from all of my major joints. To top it off I had a wicked groin pull. I put the fork legs in my jersey pockets (didn't want to litter) used my front wheel as a crutch and tied my spare tube to the frame to make shoulder sling so I could carry my bike. On my walk home I met many an interested cyclist who wanted to examine just how an aluminum fork was made. It was very easy to see how the legs were glued with epoxy to the crown. I don't ride on bike paths any more but that’s a different thread.

P.S. Her bike wasn't perfect but she was able to ride home.

tivoli_mike

Well, I was 16 and living in Frankfurt am Main at the time. I was riding down a hill on my Peugeot 10-speed and decided to to resling my backpack. Of course one of the straps flys into my front wheel, I flip over the bike then amazingly my bike flips over me! I rolled to a stop in the middle of the road with chunks the size of boulders wedged in my hand. Luckily it was a quiet residential street with no traffic. Finally got up and limped back home with my bike, which suffered no damage....

Amazing thing was that I didn't wear a helmet in those days, and I suffered only some road rash and a bruised knee...

Ouch !

The worst one that I can remember was as a kid riding my Raleigh Chopper for the first time, I thought I was the Dogs B******s so decided to see how fast I could go, as I tried to take a corner flat out the front wheel (what size were they ?) hit the kerb, I shot through the handlebars and face planted into a wall. I was a mess and staggered home without my bike, a friend seen what happened and went and recovered the bike for me ( at the time I couldn't have give a **** what happened to it).


On the adult front whilst I've had my share of tumbles, the one that's sticks in my mind was the time I took my 10 year old soon for a ride.

I took him for a ride up the local mountain to show him some of the Downhill trails, after showing him the easiest one I let him have a go. He went first so that I could keep an eye on him, as he set off like a screaming banshee (kids don't know fear) I tried to keep up with him but payed to much attention to him and not enough to where I was going, needless to say I came off in spectacular style getting tangled up in the bike in the process and getting winded by the bars. I had to try to get back on the bike straight away and chase after my son, (it wasn't easy).

Now I don't worry about him I know he's far better than I'll ever be. ( and he know's it:irritated)