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Come to think of it, commute near misses don't really count, cos there's far too many of them!!
Crikey, I think there's a few on here that are worst EVER, not Never... 🙂
Nothing anywhere near most of these as I tend to have comedy crashes. Worst I can think of is over cooking a right hand bend on a bridleway. Flew off in to the woods and the bike hit a very low wall, bike just stopped dead and flung me through the air superman style.
I remember thinking it was going to hurt. Hit a tree with my left thigh and this knocked me to one side, narrowly missing a big pile of rocks. Tumbled a few times (sky, ground, sky, ground etc) and finally landed on my back. Badly winded, bruised and bleeding I rolled about for a bit making animal noises. Then realised I was rolling around in nettles.
That was a shit ride home. Bent front wheel, bleeding and aching whilst covered in nettle stings. Glad I missed the rick pile though. That would have truly messed me up.
Back in the pre kids days, i was down at uk bikepark/blandford doing an uplift day and decided to do one of the ladder drop/road gaps they had tucked away in the trees. Not in itself massive drop maybe 12 ft if you plop of the end, but fearing coming up short on the track that runs under it i went way to fast which i realised as i sailed of down the steep transition, landing just before the track at the bottom and just in front of a tree. So with huge skill (LUCK) i steered around the tree with the mighty 66's fully compressed my chest on the bars and the visor of my hat buzzing the front tyre and the brakes locked on which wasn't very useful as the rear wheel was way up in the air and the soil there is chalky clag.
Happy days! not for my mate who didn't heed my advice and had a massive stack 🙂
Out on a nightride with my new Light & Motion HID (so around 2006ish), decided to head round the cliffs at Balcary bay nr Auchencairn (sw scotland). all was going well till i made my way down the biggish roughest slope, front wheel dropped at speed into a massive newly dug rabbit hole (that wasn't there two days previous) and my HID light shut off (broken filament), lost control in the darkness and i had no idea of where i was position wise on the cliff but somehow managed to wrestle control back and come to a stop way down the hill within 12" of heading over the edge of the cliff, if i had placed my right foot down i would have tumbled over 200ft to the shore below, I tore all the muscles in both shoulders with the initial impact (took months to heal) and i was so shook up that i thought i was having a heart attack/panic attack, i made it back to the road at Balcary Bay hotel and my legs totally gave up in a fit of the shakes, i couldn't stand up at all so had to call my brother to come and pick me up - was ill with shock for quite a few days afterwards.
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That'd be a crash I'd never have...... because I'd be about 30 yards back inside that fence.
At night too - are you.... y'know..... all there?
Riding from Pointe des Mossettes to I think it's the top of the Swiss National track. Big group racing along the fire road, I was taking some devious overtaking lines at the edge when I'm suddenly faced with a monster +2m wide by 1m deep ditch. Certainly traveling above 20mph at this moment with only a split second to react. Fortunately I can bunny hop reasonably well and I was able to hop over it. But I've no idea how I reacted fast enough to initiate that size hop. If I hadn't been able to hop over it I would have been in an almighty mess... even worse if I'd been catapulted off the near cliff edge!
It never used to faze me when riding round the cliffs as i had rode them so many times over the previous years i found it easy so to speak, it only really hit home when i took my brother and a mate round there a few months later and they refused to ride the cliff path (it's ****ing suicidal - from my bro) and rode in the field instead.
Quite rough in places but there are a few good lines down it, even for a hardtail with 80mm of fork travel
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I was never quite as complacent afterwards though so i guess i learned a valuable lesson
LOL, just typed a reply, submitted, now looked at thread title again... As you were! 😉
^^at least you realised though. I typed three paragraphs describing an actual crash!
Many years ago, I was a teenager and interested in messing with my road bike. It was a kind of heavy tourer with a dynamo on the front tyre for the lights, mudguards, rack, the works. For the holidays I turned into a race bike (or so I thought) by stripping off all the stuff I didn't need and fitting drop handlebars. When school started again, I put it all back. As I rode to school, I suddenly heard a loud "plink plink plink...". Looked down, and it was my dynamo, which hadn't been attached properly, had slipped down the fork, and was popping in and out of the spokes as I rolled along. I remember thinking "that's dangerous" when, of course, the dynamo locked itself into the wheel. My flight over the bars was long and the landing was brutal. But I was 14 or so, so I just picked the grit out of my hands, wiped the blood from my eyes, and walked to school, carrying a bike with a fork that was bent backwards from the impact... I have always tightened my screws properly since then. I just shrugged it off, so it must count as a crash I never really had, right?
When living in the UK , I used to do add a few miles to morning commute . One day the wind was right to try and take a KOM . I had failed previously by few seconds . It was dark and I had a magicshine light with the 4 battery pack strapped to the stem . I was doing in excess of 45km/h when the battery came undone . I can still see it bouncing off the front wheel several times . Luckily it did not jam itself between the forks and the wheel .
About 2011-ish I ran out of talent on the motorway section at the bottom of Cwmcarn, and landed sideways off one of the jumps. Picked myself up and went for a another run of the black which was - thankfully - uneventful.
The next day I dropped the forks out of my bike to send them off for a service, and found that the previous day's crash had very nearly torn the steerer tube in half. There was a long crack running 3/4 of the way around the tube. Probably best not to think about what could have happened on that last run if my bars and bike had decided to part company...
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A road one from me.
We used to live in North Wales and a regular ride was the Snowdon circuit usually going anti-clockwise. This meant riding up from Nant Gwynant to Pen y Gwryd and up to Pen y Pass giving a blast down Llanberis Pass as a finale.
This day I crested the top and began the descent and I was shifting - the Cateye computer was showing 46MPH at the first bend! There's a low wall on the right hand side of the road so you can see cars coming the other way which lets you take the racing line around the bends. Having overtaken a few "careful Mildred, this is a dangerous road" tourists I rounded a left hand bend to see a car looking at pulling out from one of the various parking bays. The driver looked up the road and either didn't see me or thought "Bike? They don't go very fast" and proceeded to pull into the road.
I began to drift to the right hand side of the road and hit the brakes. This was when the problems started as my back wheel hit a cats-eye as I crossed the centre of the road. The back wheel was now in intermittent contact with the road and I was still closing on the car very quickly. I began scanning the hillside on the other side of the low wall for landing spots amongst the boulders. It was then that the driver realised we were on a collision course and stopped - phew! I shot past at about 30MPH and managed to scream "bas***d!" into his open window.
Three miles later he sheepishly overtook me.
I’ve only just lost my thousand yard stare from a ‘not crash’ about 2 hours ago.
Dropped into a new trail, well new to me. Following a mate who knows the trail with Mr. Keen behind me egging me on to chase him. This was my first mistake. If I’d taken the time to assess the situation it would have been clear - all things being equal - rider 1 is riding a trail he knows as quickly as he thinks is safe (it was that kind of night) rider 2 (me) is 10 metres back and traveling slower because I don’t know the trail. Listens to Mr. Keen, but to catch rider 1 I not only have to match his speed, but surpass it...
It started as a quite large rear wheel drift, then it was a two wheel drift, then quite the high speed low-side. I managed to get my foot down and kick myself up, but now I’m pointing on a 45 degree angle to the trail, off into th undergrowth, missed a tree and not a mark on me.
According to Strava it was about a 30kph slide.
At 6 years old I rode into a tree, a neighbor took me to my mom, with me covered in blood.
she asked the neighbor why has she brought this little boy to her, my mom did not recognise me there was so much blood.
Still riding at 49 😁
Oh, good thread, I have two for this:
#1 - Ullapool, when I was a wee nipper. I was on my bike pegging down the hill on the pavement on my way into the village for a fiddle lesson when said fiddle (strapped to my back) swung round and clipped my back wheel. I was sent burling into the main road where not a second after I reached the other side, still out of control, an articulated lorry came speeding round the corner on its way from the ferry. Literally a second or two later and I would have been toast.
#2 North Third, Stirling. This set of trails runs along three clifftops, and at times you are no more than a metre or less from the 70ft+ drop to your left. I went to put in a pedal stroke and struck a root, which sent me humped over the bars and with a sharp left towards the cliff edge. I just managed to get a foot down and the brakes slammed on with the front wheel hanging at the edge. I got of the bike, threw it down at the side of the trail and just sat there in total silence, shaky hands and all, for 5 minutes at what would have been a horrendous and ridiculous way to go. Still gets me to this day that one.
Coming home late after work and a beer more than would have been sensible.
Bottom of a longish but not too steep hill with lights at junction. Queue of traffic ahead and nothing coming in the opposite direction. I pull out to overtake slower moving traffic, winding it up to catch the green, out of saddle in the drops. Clang in to top gear at full whack, chain jumps off top cog and jams solid. Left foot over top of pedal then to the floor, drivetrain locked up with pedal jammed in back of calf and balls deep in the cross bar. Kept upright and observant driver next to me stamped on the brakes and avoiding driving over me too.
2010, coming down a loose footpath/gravelly descent in Wendover at much speed as a part of a group. 30mph according to Garmin. One of the riders decided to come past on my inside with no announcement. Our bars hit. Outsiders say it looked absolute carnage, with bikes, people, gravel and dust piling down the hill.
I was unconscious for a while with my helmet in two pieces. When I awoke, I felt fine other than a few bruises and scrapes, except a dull ache in my shoulder. We concluded I'd probably fractured my collar bone, and I was given a lift to the hospital.
I was scanned. I'd broken my right side collar bone in 5 places, my left elbow and my left thumb. The left side was plastered up and the right out in a sling I was asked to return at 9am the following morning for a follow up.
So I arrived at 9am, expecting the usual wait. However, a pale looking nurse ushered me direct to the Consultant. "You're going to surgery he said, now. Puzzled I asked why and he showed me the X Ray of my shoulder in pieces, with one of those pieces sitting 2mm from my R/H lung. I needed surgery to move that and assemble my shoulder.
I felt OK after waking (Morphine 😀 ) but I has 2 plates and lots of screws to put me together again. The subsequent few weekends were awful - at first cycling between Codiene, Paracetamol and Ibruprofen, then easing off the Codeine, but then returned to have dressing ripped off my sore & hair-growing-again chest every week. Also a bit inconvienenient at home with no arms to use, day time TV wasn't as good then as it is now. £ months off the bike and some permanent neck issues.
I've had a fair few near misses with car drivers doing silly things. So much so that it doesn't phase me any more.
The worst i've had is descending on the road bike at 45-50mph and the bike hitting a vibration frequency where it started to oscillate and weave. That was terrifying.
For those that know the area. As a kid, coming down Cheney Hill heading back towards Newport, I hit a smidge over 45mph according to my Cateye speedo. I get most of the way down then get speed wobbles... I ended up fighting the bike so I didn't fall into the road, and landed on the grass verge and jettisoned the bike. Sliding down the verge, I look up and see a fence post coming towards my head at a rate of knots, I manage to turn my self around, but ended up wrapping my knee around said fence post.
9 months in physio once a week later, and walking doesn't hurt anymore. To this day, I still have knee problems.
Some of these are horrific but sadly don't qualify. 9 months in physio or emergency surgery to stop your collarbone puncturing a lung don't count as crashes you NEVER had!
This thread should be for the ones where you shut your eyes expecting when you opened them again it would be St Peter you see, only for some miracle to occur and you get away scot free.
Riding down the high Street in Edinburgh at about 20mph, in pouring rain one summer day, the lights at south bridge just starting to turn from green to red, and me thinking that i'll make that no problem where i was turning left. A bus, probably setting off on the orange light, starting to cross my path from the right, and as i was a little late on the lights i pushed on...turned in and the front wheel washed out on me (this road is cobbles and wet Edinburgh cobbles don't provide much in the way of grip). Sensing the impending doom, i put a foot down and stepped off the bike, which continued on its path under the front of the bus, which by now wasn't quite as stationary as i would have liked as my bike got stuck under it. I kinda stumbled onto the pavement and was instantly comforted by a very nice Italian lady, which is the start of another story 🙂
Just remembered another one. Riding the Pila-Aosta descent in a wheel-to-wheel train with White Room colleagues Pat & Alex. Alex is up front, Pat's in the middle, I'm at the back. We go off one of the jumps and in the landing, Pat stops dead, like he's grabbed a massive handful of both brakes or run into a brick wall or something. My life flashes before my eyes and I consider a future as Pat's Scottish enema but somehow manage to just clip him and get past safely and stop.
Turned-out his shifter had detached itself from the bars, dropped down and jammed between the tyre and fork arch.