The Wrong Bike

Sometimes you have to wonder at people. I was skimming through the internet the other day and came across this report from Avon and Somerset Police about a bike that had been stolen. It caught my eye especially as it was stolen from that Bristol institution, the Ashton Court Balloon Fiesta, a time for all the fun of canvas and large propane burners and a spectacle of odd shapes drifting across the sky.

At first I sympathised. I feel for anyone who has had a bike stolen, In fact having anything taken without permission is a terrible thing. But then I read further. I was all good up to the beginning of the description of the bike (setting aside, for a moment my problem with the phrase “fairly unique”) and feeling sorry for the unlucky freerider who’d shelled out over £2000 and then had their pride and joy stolen from an event where, I’m assuming, they were helping out with the fire or ambulance service in order to be allowed to secure their bike behind the tent. They were obviously an adrenaline-seeking Good Samaritan giving their time off from knarly drops to help others.

Except I then read on.

The bike had a “unique stem” which allowed the handlebar height to be adjusted. If it’s unique then perhaps it was machined and engineered at home and a triumph of clever ingenuity and breaking the defined limits of stem technology. On the other hand it might have been something like this, which means you can buy uniqueness for under twenty quid. It’s also not a stem I would expect to find on a freeride bike. Any extra joins are a potential area to fail as you nail that big jump, and it seems dangerous to risk a sudden drop in handlebar height at that sort of moment. That’s how you lose teeth. Also, and I might be the strange one here, I have never felt the need to adjust my stem angle for different rides. I really think that you should put the effort in to find a stem that fits the way you ride and gives you the height and reach you need, fit it onto the bike and then forget about it until or unless it breaks or you change size.

More annoying even than the stem was the child seat. Yes, that’s right, a child seat fitted to a bike built for “All-Mountain” riding. So does the rider take his child, who I’m assuming is too young to ride their own bike, on Northshore style hard-core sessions and off vertical cliffs? That seems highly irresponsible. On the other hand has someone gone out and bought a bike that’s totally wrong for what they need it for? It seems they’ve laid out two thousand pounds on a bike to carry their kid around on and ride in an entirely non aggressive way. In that case they have more money than sense and I secretly hope the bike’s found a better home where it’ll get to be ridden in a way it’s intended (obviously once the stem and child seat have been swapped out). Perhaps the original owner can buy a more suitable bike next time rather than getting seduced by an image they wish they had.

I do hope I’m wrong.

On the other hand, while any bike theft is despicable, some take it to a whole new level. I can't imagine the sort of person who would steal a Paramedic's bike while they were helping someone into an ambulance, but apparently it does happen. Definitely a case of stealing the wrong bike.

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