Obviously a tragic story for those involved so apologies for bringing this up.

This BBC article makes reference to a ‘Road Bicycle Crash’. Now that’s the first time I’ve heard that reference. Is this the new dawn just as RTA was replaced with RTC or is it just some junior Web monkey getting overexcited?

Sounds like there was a boy on a bicycle on the road and he somehow got killed. They don’t know any details of how he was killed.

2 options

1 It was a crash on the road, involving a bicycle. Possible also indication that there was another (larger, engine powered) vehicle involved, rather than rider error. (Think what your intial thought would be if it was just “bicycle crash”.)

2 It is a crude attempt to imply that he was out “roadieing” ie, lycra’d up, head down arse up, wobbly skinny tyred bike with useless brakes*, only out for fitness/recreation rather than transportation; and therefore due less public sympathy.

I’d like to think it is the former option, but I am an optimist.

*as described by an average non cyclist who doesn’t understand how bikes work.

2 It is a crude attempt to imply that he was out “roadieing” ie, lycra’d up, head down arse up, wobbly skinny tyred bike with useless brakes*,

*as described by an average non cyclist who doesn’t understand how bikes work.

I don’t think any non cyclists would refer to ‘roadie’s’ in any sense. Any bicycle on a road is a road bicycle to most people who would read that because theres not really any kind of bicycle you couldn’t or wouldn’t ride on a road, Nobody is trying to spin this story, theres just no information but space to fill

What you get with a story breaking with very little information is a lack of words to put on the page to make the story actually look like a story –  its important enough to publish but theres no information to impart. So anywhere you can introduce a word to fill things out the writers will. So – any number between ’13’ and ’20’  becomes ‘more than a dozen’ for instance.

You get a surprising number of stories where the headline, the story and a statement from the police are the same 7 or 8 words repeated in three different orders.

Possible also indication that there was another (larger, engine powered) vehicle involved

Actually, I’d read it the exact opposite way. “Killed in crash” is usefully ambiguous if no further details are known. “Road bicycle crash”, to me, implies that there was no other vehicle—or at the very least, it directs the reader’s focus to that vehicle.

We don’t know what actually happened, though, and until we do it’s hard to make a useful comment on how appropriate the phrasing is. It’s a clumsy way of wording it, though, and not one that I can recall having seen before.

This story https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/teenage-boy-killed-bicycle-collision-22440854 has a little more info – it says there was a ‘collision’, so there must have been something to collide with.

Strange article. Usually they mention they’re either ‘looking to speak with a driver’ or ‘a driver is cooperating with enquiries’. This has neither – suspect there’s something unusual about this case, but can’t figure out what.

Either way, it’s pretty sad.

Update on this thread here.

This time a strange reference to it being near a cycle path and still no mention of any other vehicles involved. Looks like an e-bike/telegraph pole crash.