Mental snapshots from a crash next to me
09-03-07, 01:56 PM
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Mental snapshots from a crash next to me
Every time I see those amazing crash photos that are occasionally posted with riders and bikes caught in midair, I cringe. Now I have a couple of mental images like that from today.
We had a fairly bad crash today in our local big Labor Day group ride. We had a good group going out, probably 100 people, and it started to string out once we got out of town. The BSing and warmup had ended but we were still riding in two columns, and the pace had just kicked up to 25-26. I'd just run something over and we were in a rough pavement section. I hear a tire skittering on pavement noise and look over..the guy next to me is going down, hard.
We think he must've caught his wheel on a pavement crack, because all I saw was his front wheel sweeping sideways. My next mental snapshot is of the front wheel of the girl behind him running across his chest.
She went down, along with a couple more people behind. Next mental snapshot: I see a titanium frame flying in the air, clean across both lanes of traffic. Weird that somehow I saw the frame color and knew it was titanium. 
Fortunately there was no traffic oncoming.
The girl was OK; the first guy was road rashed pretty good and seemed stunned. He insisted he didn't want to go to the hospital, and didn't seem concussed or seriously hurt, just shaken up. We called him a ride as it was pretty clear he wasn't going to be able to keep riding. One of the other crashees, a tough little Columbian ex-racer, hit pretty hard. I thought he was going to ride back to the start point. When I saw him afterwards, he told me he'd finished the ride. He showed me the huge crack and smashed section of his helmet and he had a nice bruise underneath it. He'd have been in bad shape without it.
Everyone involved was fortunate and there didn't seem to be any serious injuries. I spent the rest of the ride a bit nervous.
We had a fairly bad crash today in our local big Labor Day group ride. We had a good group going out, probably 100 people, and it started to string out once we got out of town. The BSing and warmup had ended but we were still riding in two columns, and the pace had just kicked up to 25-26. I'd just run something over and we were in a rough pavement section. I hear a tire skittering on pavement noise and look over..the guy next to me is going down, hard.
We think he must've caught his wheel on a pavement crack, because all I saw was his front wheel sweeping sideways. My next mental snapshot is of the front wheel of the girl behind him running across his chest.
She went down, along with a couple more people behind. Next mental snapshot: I see a titanium frame flying in the air, clean across both lanes of traffic. Weird that somehow I saw the frame color and knew it was titanium. Fortunately there was no traffic oncoming.The girl was OK; the first guy was road rashed pretty good and seemed stunned. He insisted he didn't want to go to the hospital, and didn't seem concussed or seriously hurt, just shaken up. We called him a ride as it was pretty clear he wasn't going to be able to keep riding. One of the other crashees, a tough little Columbian ex-racer, hit pretty hard. I thought he was going to ride back to the start point. When I saw him afterwards, he told me he'd finished the ride. He showed me the huge crack and smashed section of his helmet and he had a nice bruise underneath it. He'd have been in bad shape without it.
Everyone involved was fortunate and there didn't seem to be any serious injuries. I spent the rest of the ride a bit nervous.
