A couple of incidents come to mind for me…
One was at the Macavalanche (poor man’s megavalanche at Glencoe); whilst I was checking my qualifying time, quite a well known female MTB racer came up, invaded my personal space and brushed herself against me… bear in mind that we had met previously and she had spilled out some quite deep personal information, so I’d been doing my best to comfort her.
Whilst she is no doubt an attractive woman, it was pretty awkward,
A. because I was in a relationship at the time (which to be fair had been in a bad way for a while but I was concerned for the welfare of my step-daughter at the time, so perservered)
B. because her previous partner was really quite famous and I really didn’t want any of the potential fallout from such attention.
Long story short, whilst that encounter itself is of no real consequence to me, other people’s reactions to it and the string of events that resulted have caused no end of bother.
Including the 2nd incident, which still used by others against me to this day…
another quite well known female MTBer began using certain unconventional methods to capture my attention; to start with, I kinda figured it was a wind up as a result of inside knowledge of the 1st incident and tried to convey the silliness of it all, considering I’d been recovering from injury and was far from my best.
I’m not sure if a relationship with a girl who smoke me on a bike would work that well really; surely she’d get bored of a slowcoach and then of course there was the age gap, which didn’t really sit well with me, especially as it was around the time the Prince Andrew/Jeffrey Epstein thing was in the press~ Whilst there was no element of prostitution, arms dealing or girls as young as 12, it still felt a bit wrong and inappropriate. It didn’t help that I remembered sending her Dad a CV when I finished my apprenticeship and I worked out how old she must’ve been then~ it didn’t sit well with me.
Time went on and I thought it’d all been forgotten about, but various things happened which suggested otherwise, amongst which included me turning up to marshall at a race, her seeing me as she was driving her van away from the pits and coming to a stop, then looking at me expectantly. For the reasons mentioned above and the fact I was caught up in some stuff that genuinely led me to worry about her safety, I ignored her and walked by, but still the harrasment continued.
The long and short of it is, eventually I felt pressured into doing something about it, which resulted in me getting very drunk in a situation I shouldn’t have been in.
And that hell hath no fury thing…
Truth be told, the incidents alone don’t bother me that much, it’s the collective reactions I’ve experienced from people since.
Anyone have any similar tales of woe?