If you needed reminding that cycling can be dangerous then you don’t really need to look much beyond the first-week carnage of the Tour de France, or, indeed at good, but not as good as his siblings, downhill mountain biker, Dan Atherton. Whether you’re breaking your neck or your elbow it’s clear that competitive and extreme cycling can be hazardous.
What shouldn’t be quite so risky is riding along a highway in America. But yet another county there are considering banning bikes on major roads for the safety of the cyclists. It seems to me that it’s precisely the drivers who rush to comment on these stories that make the roads at all dangerous and a better move would be to ban anyone who makes the kind of comments that suggest they might want to deliberately hurt cyclist from driving. Once again feel free to play FMFT red-light bingo and the person who correctly guesses how many comments pass before someone mentions cyclists running red lights can be considered for (but will not actually receive) a significant prize.
At least in this country cyclist are allowed on all road except motorways and can rely on well marked and clear road painting with very few unscheduled breaks for dead badgers. Bear in mind when using the roads that a broken dead badger line on the middle of the road, means you probably may, or perhaps may not, overtake, as long as there’s a squirrel watching.
Talking of courses, which we weren’t really, the Olympic mountain bike course is now being built at Hadleigh Castle. This will offer a stunningly technical and exceptionally hilly course on a flood plain in Essex. Let’s hope the designers can make the most of what’s there and create something worthwhile out of what might appear to be a uninspiring landscape. If it remains open after the Olympics as well it might just be an interesting place to ride, accessible from North London, which, entirely selfishly, would be great.
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