Originally Posted by
Bandera
No, I do not.
In the 51 years since I've taken up cycling as a sport I've
never seen a set of handlebars fail in service on the track, road, cross or MTB, although I have seen a few bend from crash impacts.( I even ride CF bars now on my "modern-ish" bike, and don't know anyone who had a failure who does.)
"Most often"? So a regularly occurring failure of a critical component at pace was regarded as
normal like a tire puncture en peloton ?
Did your en peloton riders also carry a spare set of drop bars under the saddle to replace on the roadside like a flatted tubular with such a failure occurring with "frequency"?
It is
astounding that anyone survived en peloton such regular catastrophic failures, or considered purchasing Cinelli bars and stems instead of what amazingly inferior "handlebars broke with some frequency".
En Peloton Rider 1: "Mon guidon vient de casser, encore une fois!"
En Peloton Rider 2: "C'est normal."
En Peloton Riber 1: "Oui, c'est trop dommage."
A try at humor in the "crawled to school through 10' snow of school" genre that just misses being actually funny, or even vaguely "period correct".
Cool story attempt, Bro.
Have you tried a variantion on the classic:
"Louison Bobet, Jaques Anquitil and a Duck walk into a bar in Roubaix" joke instead?
-Bandera
They were always Cinelli or TTT that broke. What else would we be riding? And yes, it is a catastrophic failure by most definitions. Everyone survived.
Years later when I broke a Deda stem that was harder, but I did keep the bike upright and ride ten miles home. The stem had a bad and obvious manufacturing defect so I rode it over to the LBS thinking perhaps this could occasion a recall. Bike shop yawned and tossed stem into bin of broken high end stems. You've never seen this?
We were balanced on our bikes. What would happen was you'd notice something felt odd or loose and look down, see that the right side of bars was unconnected. Full compensation by left side had already occurred. No one ever panicked. It could take a minute to extricate oneself from pack but everyone knew what was happening and everyone cooperated. Only new guys were surprised and no one startled.
The notion that riding a bike requires superhuman ability is very strange. The notion that any part of a bike is immune to failure is very very strange.