Wrong way around brakes

Went for a ride with a couple of other families this morning. Our standard group. Five kids from 5-10 years old. The other two dads are quite short, and my eldest is getting tall. So after a few laps of a favourite set of jumps I said why don’t you have a go on Tommy’s dad’s bike. A Santa Cruz 5010 is a step up from his Trek Marlin!

I follow him down and he’s looking great as he flies over the table tops, then just at the end of the run he suddenly goes OTB and takes the handlebars in his back and plenty of bark off his arms! Tommy’s dad is Colombian he runs his brakes the wrong way ‘round!

Last week I was riding with the Colombian again and noticed he had a good scratch on his arm. When i asked what caused it he told me his new bike (Specialized) bought in Australia had the bikes the ‘correct’ way around. He’d got used to it now … except when he panic braked on a trail and hit the front brake recently.

As he has Sram brakes I got the tools out there and then and swapped the levers for him. He hadn’t realised that was possible, poor bugger.

A couple of years ago a buddy was working at a rental shop in Squamish. One day we decided to ride some ‘off the map’ trails outside of the immediate area, starting about 2000 meters up. J and I took out rental E-bikes, and his girlfriend borrowed the local sales reps bike.  I checked my bike over and swapped the brakes over to be UK style.

His girlfriend is a really good rider (can ride Squamish Double Blacks, hit big jump lines in Whistler Bike Park, is a qualified coach etc). The trails in question would be classed as BC Double Black in places, but pretty ‘out there’ should anything go wrong.

Anyway, other than two of us forgetting to turn off the climb switches on the Float X2s for a good chunk of the  descents, the riding was fairly un-eventful given the terrain.

Ride over, buddy took the bikes back to the shop to give them a once over and put them on the chargers.

During this I got a text message. “V’s brakes were on the wrong way around!!!” The sale rep is from the UK and so has his brakes ‘normal’. V managed to ride the bike for about 4 hours, including about 1700 meters of descending on steep gnarly BC trails, and not spot that the brakes were the wrong way around. Our minds were all blown ha ha. She must have subconsciously figured it out straight away, but just never consciously noted it.

I’ve ridden with a couple of guys who can ride either way round. No idea how they can adapt, I can’t even ride round a carpark with brakes the wrong way round.

When I got my Zaskar back in 98 I took it for a decent ride out along the Trent along the footpath from Nottingham out towards Attenborough. I decided to do a bit of exploring so was looking for tracks to get down off the main path. The Zaskar had XT parallelogram V’s and lovely Mavic 217 rims. I was used to a very tired BSO type mountain bike with canti’s. The first time I grabbed the front, as was required on the BSO I ended up OTB and a good 4 meters in front of the bike in a patch of nettles. Those XT brakes were pretty keen even on the correct side!