Originally Posted by carpediemracing

Handlebars, understood. That's a critical part of your control center if you will, front wheel and bars. Question is were you ready for the impact? Although the other rider initiated contact it's also on you to be prepared for contact. For example say (theoretically) someone squeezed that outside rider into you? Same situation, slightly different cause. Would you have been able to save yourself?

Not trying to be a jerk, it's just that it looks like you weren't as aware of what was going on as well, or at least prepared to react if it did happen, especially after that first guy went flying across your front wheel.

Also I would take offense with the phrase "purely out of negligence". You can definitely say that the guy was too close to you. It's not right to give the reason the guy turned too close, you just don't know.

Basically to me it looks like a normal race situation that resulted in one surprised rider hitting the deck. I'm sorry that you hit the deck but you haven't convinced me that the other guy was entirely at fault or malicious etc.

On the other hand I've had very sly, very experienced riders do similar moves to me. Although they seemed sort of clueless when it happened the amount of lateral movement and some of their body language indicated to me that they did it intentionally. Plus the fact that they've been actively racing for 30+ seasons, some at Olympic levels, means they know how to pretend to be clueless. I usually let them have the spot, but I file away the incident so that I'm not surprised if they pull something like that again. When I see them do it to other people then I figure I should watch out for those moves when it gets more dicey.