Consoling your kids when it all comes unstuck.

Went out on the roadies yesterday with Gti Junior aged 15 and a neighbour. Just half a mile from home GtiJ realises that some of the annoying kids who hang around the area are in two gangs on both sides of the road so he puts in a big Cavendish-style sprint just to show off…. but it all goes wrong. His right foot unclips and he bangs down on the top tube, swerving violently towards the kerb, the bike hits the edge of the pavement and he goes over the bars and rolls twice across the pavement ending up on the village green while the bike cartwheels into the air. This is in front of about a dozen kids from the neighbourhood ranging from 6 to 14 in age.

Spectacular it certainly was and luckily the watchers were so amazed at the crash that there wasn’t any laughter or pisstaking. I picked him up and he spotted straight away that the front wheel was wrecked, the tyre burst with such force that the valve stem actually snapped and blew clean off.

He walked the last half mile home then sat down in the back garden and wept tears of shame and embarrassment. What can you do? We all crash bikes and unfortunately his youthful crashes have all been on road bikes and in very public view. He was taken to hospital two years ago when he nutted a tree. There’s no other way for kids to learn that showing off is a bad idea and I guess it’s better for him to learn the lesson now than when he’s got his first car but…. any parent will know how it feels to see your child suffer in this way; it was his own fault but that doesn’t take away the pain.

At least mountain bike crashes usually happen out of public sight.

See what you should have done is crashed in exactly the same way as your lad so as to make it seem this is perfectly normal behaviour!! TBH it sounds like the crash was so spectacular that he’ll probably be seen as cool/a hard man.

It’s one of life’s statutory lessons that must be learnt at some point.

‘Chin up lad, and here’s a present’

http://brokenridersuk.com/collections/men-s/products/mens-fast-flash-logo-forest-green-bamboo-tee

Show him videos of Tyler Farrar crashing in every race he’s ever entered (whilst taking out everyone around him).

in a big Cavendish-style sprint

As in this year’s TdF?

He’s up and walking the other kids will give him some credit for that (maybe not to his face or each other but it’ll be logged in the collective memory).

Sounds epic and tough to take, hope he’s OK.

Watch Won’t Back Down with him, Peaty crashing in front of thousands of friends, fans and MTB world media when looking dead cert for the World Champs, Sam Hill doing the same.

Or as you say, Cav at this years TdF

Tell him it happens to the best in all walks of life, he’s lucky/tough to be in one piece, chicks dig scars etc but needs to wash the dishes/car/bikes/his bedsheets for a month to pay for a new wheel?

N.b. Long time since I was 15, still get the piss taken by mates for crashing and my boy is 2 so my parenting skills are just beginning 😉

On the Cavendish theme a trip to see the Gent Six would be a more possitive experience to remember

http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/cavendish-to-ride-the-gent-six

The measure of a man is not in his failure but in what he does after he fails.
Them that does nowt do no wrong.
And 101 other platitudes .
My dad would have never consoled me just made it clear without really saying anything that I was to pick myself up and soldier on. I did have a difficult ” relationship with him through my teens though .

Give him an embellished account of your most humiliating fail.. So that he laughs and can see we all do it. He still has his teeth and no bones got broken so it could have been way worse.
He’ll see the funny side of his otb one day.. Just not right now.

Watch Batman…..

Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up

Only one thing for it. Point and laugh. 😀

Show him Jens coming off, all on his own. Remind him that shit happens – I raced straight into the back of a parked caravan once in front of all my mates … and show him how to tighten up his pedals, if you haven’t already

Tell him to tell the other kids that something on the bike broke.
The sooner he masters the looking at the imaginary bit of componentry failure that causes the embarrassing crashes, the more convincing the act will look in later life.

See no one likes a show off.

Hey, the kids won’t have noticed the ‘unclipping’. All they’ll have seen is a spectacular crash which wrecked the bike and your lad walked away from. Hope he’s OK.

its funny because he was showing off 😯

Don’t tell him to lie because of the shame 🙄

He wants a bollocking for starting a sprint half a mile from home

He already knows that chicks dig scars, I presume?

its not 1974 Binners

chicks dig cash these days

As a kid I once failed to unclip at a junction falling into my dad, leaving us both lying in the road just as a club came around the corner.

I once rode so hard into the back of my Dad’s bike when he stopped without me noticing that parts had to be removed so that the bikes could be separated. This was all in front of the Liverpool to Southport charity bike ride with hundreds of riders passing on the other side of the road.

I fell of on a road with no cars, no obstacles so badly I spent two nights in hospital with concussion, a broken arm and more road rash on my face than skin. Still to this day no Iidea why.

Came off on a corner in a crit on some dog shit in front of a group of girls.

The list is endless. Embarrassing at the time no doubt but funny now. Chin up gti j. In a few weeks it’ll be an amusing story.

Also in true Cav style would mean taking out half the bunch too.

If I’d done that in front of my father, I’d have received a terse “what did you do that for?”

Showing weakness isn’t really done in my family….

Kind words, thanks! I’ve ordered that T shirt for him for Christmas.

I tried to show off in front of a group of girls I knew back in the early 90s. The intention was a bit of a jump, landing to a big skid.

Hit the jump too fast, ploughed into them accidentally at full pelt. Scattered them like 9 pins.

Tell him to keep his chin up.

I’ve just remembered crashing hard in the FOD when I jumped my full-rigid Trek off a berm right in front of a group of Ramblers and landed badly. So we’ve all done it.

Just show him this thread! It’ll have hapened to everyone, guaranteed. But really, learning how to turn humiliation into a funny situation is a key lesson. If you look all humiliated then everyone will look at you as someone with too much pride and laugh at you. If on the other hand you just laugh at yourself, then everyone else will laugh too and you’ll get respect for being ‘cool’ in the original sense of the word.

I crashed at full tip into the back of a parked Vauxhall Cavalier because I was showing off to some chicks on a passing bus. The Cavalier was loaded with a family about to set off. Double embarrassment! I slithered off the boot with my balls in my mouth (not quite but they were bruised).

I was riding a white Ammaco road bike with white a seat and white walled tyres….

At least he was out riding not sitting on the green smoking weed and drinking cheap cider.

Help him get back on, go out with him again until he gets his confidence back (and that’s not so much confidence on the bike but in going past the other kids).

As a kid I once failed to unclip at a junction falling into my dad

That statement makes me feel so old. 😆

Surely its child abuse to make your kids ride a roadbike?
Get him on a mountain bike ffs before he starts leg shaving and wearing them ludicrous bib shorts.

“See no one likes a show off”
or a smart arse.

Let him to laugh it off, the bike failure is a good line, chain slipped/ broke.
Everyone loves a epic crash, I bet the locals will be talking it up.
If he doesn’t go to school on Monday, “the word on the street” will have him on a drip by Tuesday.