In that case she is still in denial about the Team Sprint – not only did she very very clearly screw up (miles over the line), but it was her fault and she denied Jess Varnish a chance of an olympic medal.

Do you think they should have been let off that infringement then?

I think you’re in denial too – and for no reason. She won an amazing Silver to go with her amazing Keirin gold, to top off an amazing career in a sport that often has very close finishes which don’t always go your way.

So sputnik. In what way is the Women’s Team Sprint relevant? You brought it up, but you appear now to be ignoring it?

and having been pushed/elbowed by your opponent causing you to go out of your lane, and you must just keep calm and carry on?

Sprinting is often marginal – dealing with it is part of the sport.

Elbowing happened after the swerve.

Keeping calm and carrying on is a skill of track sprinting.

Yes I saw that. How is that relevant? They (well, VP) screwed up. And?

For the second time? What? when?

You guys need to ask yourselves honestly what your opinion would be with the positions reversed. It’s just ridiculous. Plus it was only the first round – sprinters should be able to re-compose themselves, and she didn’t. Sadly her second run was poor, with poor judgement. Meares deserved the win, on balance.

“Being there” ie the velodrome is unbeatable for the experience and atmosphere, but sitting in front of a large screen HD telly is unbeatable for seeing what actually happens in sport with super slow motion as well.

Unbeatable – for seeing what you want to see!

I just watched it again a few times, and the only serious elbows were after the swerve. Thee was a little swinging around from Meares just before, but not an actual shove.

If your head goes after a dispute, you aren’t a very good sprint racer! It is a nervy business – all part of the game.

You get a lot of marginal calls in sprinting – this time it didn’t go VP’s way. To me it looked like she came out to block fractionally before any elbows action. Whatever – it is a best of three contest, and she did have the best position in the second leg. Mears beat her with better nerve and tactics in the that leg. On balance, I don’t think the result was unfair.

Al – you’ve just said exactly that same thing as me.

Oh well I guess we disagree on that one.

Hopefully we only disagree on the importance of what it’s called!

Nobody could argue that it isn’t dangerous to filter inside – as this tragic case proves pretty damned conclusively.

A stopped car/bus isn’t going to turn left and drive over you, so for this discussion they are utterly different IMO.

Nearly all of those turn left deaths are from vehicles that were stopped and upon pulling away then turn left!

Running up the gutter inside traffic (moving or stationery) is risky. You should never assume that it is the normal/safe thing to do without having a proper look – what are you going to do if someone turns left? Is there enough room to get out of the blind spots? Where are you going to (is there a safe place that you are trying to get to)? etc.

Whether you call it undertaking or filtering is utterly irrelevant.

That’s filtering.

What’s the point of being pedantic?

Filtering, undertaking – we all know what it is, what’s the point in arguing about what it’s called? Filtering under traffic is bloody dangerous and gets people killed. Don’t just do it without assessing the risk – one massive factor being; can the drivers see you (or will they see you)?

Here is a ready-made (and tragic) flip-side to the frustrated drivers assuming they must overtake cyclists immediately recently discussed – the flip-side being, cyclists must not just vacantly assume that they must filter past all traffic!

Maximise space around you. What’s so wrong about just waiting in line at the traffic lights with every other road user? Put yourself somewhere that you can be seen.

The helmet debate is at best a red herring, at worst a signal to other road users that cyclists aren’t doing enough.

Time stuck behind these cyclists vs time wasted in this thread?

One is not ok, but the other is?

No-one’s saying it is. But to pull over takes a few seconds, re-organising into more manageable groups takes no time if you agree it before heading onto that bit of road; versus 7 minutes of the driver’s time.

I guess you didn’t read the OP about the road not being wide enough for two cars plus a bike?

wonder why slow moving adults playing funtime on their bikes can hold cars up for miles and offer no reasonable answer why they didn’t pull in, when they could have done.

What makes the car driver’s time more important than the cyclists’?

Which is the more selfish though? Thinking a couple of extra minutes on your journey is more important than letting cyclists decide when they feel safe sounds pretty selfish to me.

Needlessly holding up a fellow human being for selfish reasons is bad.

This is the misunderstanding. Just because the car driver considers it needless, doesn’t mean it is. The cyclist alone gets to decide and the car driver will just have to wait a minute.

They didn’t call it riding in the gutter, but that’s what I’d call it! A good metre to the road edge is what I consider a minimum. Some car drivers expect much closer.

I think you’ve misunderstood..
the law is not the issue.. it’s the fact that as a morally superior species, we cyclists should show consideration and compassion to our less well evolved brethren, and the panic that they suffer when they encounter us in their metal death machines..

I and others believe that we would be doing ourselves and them a favour by helping them to get past and on their way..

Where as some grumpy old men who didn’t rebel enough in their youth believe that we should stand up for our rights regardless of the negative outcome.. I think I understand perfectly.

What some people fail to grasp is that every rider that rides in the gutter makes that the norm in the eyes of car drivers. So everyone that rides properly (pro-actively, communicating with drivers but not hiding in the side of the road) is considered by some to be obstinate/beligerent/asking for it.

We do not need to borrow the bit of road that others aren’t using – that isn’t even the road, it’s the gutter.

Gotta laugh at all this! Talking about cyclists flouting the law (it ain’t even against the law!) and all that – and you can go out any time day or night and see a substantial number of car drivers speeding and (worse in my book) driving way too close to the car in front, totally unable to see the road ahead and/or react. Ultimately, cyclists being conservative about letting a car past kills no-one.

There is of course an additional reason not to send Millar – politics! Irony being that a much more recent cheat got the gold!

Turner Guy – that exact thing has happened to me, with a bloody milkman. I was riding way way out to stop him too – and he still came by into a blind, narrow bit of road and promptly slammed on the brakes. By the time I stopped I was alongside him (nowhere else to go) – and explaining in very “clear” terms the error of his ways!

I guess I think they should have ridden to the course, not the story they had already written in their heads.

The competition was to win on that course. Millar might have had a chance, especially since he would have just sat in the break.

To be fair, I didn’t call it as 100% wrong at the time, so this is classic spouting off in hindsight. But – I certainly did say all along that a break away was a distinct possibility, especially if it gets sizeable and contains good riders.

Maybe Cav will become ever more versatile as time goes by – the dream scenario would be to mark the break… with Cav! Boonen was in there for example. (Anyone know what happened to him, btw – did he just blow?)

Face it, the police did what they did for reasons of Olympic PR, not for pubic safety or any other excuse. The powers don’t want any taint on their Olympics.

Considering the profusion of laziness and unnecessary car journeys, I think it is rather a moot point to compare a cyclist’s “unnecessary” use of the road and a car driver’s “essential” journey.

By the way, I fully expect cycling individuals and groups to slow down and be prepared to stop, just the same as any road users. When they whizz through my village they will be left in no doubt about my ideas on that front if I’m walking along! Everyone needs to be able to stop in the road that they can see at any one moment – if another road user is in the same space, adjustments must be made.

See my last post – it is ok to pull over and stop when in a group – you are not in the tdf! I have done it with groups thousands of times. Not one of those times was I risking anything (except a strava time!).

I fully agree that there is no reason for them not to pull over, on the face of it. I just assume that they had a good reason not to. Again – when you weigh it all up you have to give the cyclists the benefit of the doubt because if anything goes wrong they are the more vulnerable party.

You see this is where internet bickering is rubbish – what you have said there could be perfectly reasonable or complete bollox – you don’t know as you were not there and don’t know the road and neither do I. Facts remain that I’m struggling to imagine a 4 mile bit of quiet back road without a layby, little road junction or some such which a group could not roll through to let other traffic through if it chose. I don’t buy the its hard to do that as a group nonsense – I’ve done more group ride miles than had hot dinners and if that is the case the group should be having a word with itself about comms and groups leadership.

Obviously I wasn’t there – and neither were you. The principle is the important thing though – the cyclist has the decision, because they are the one with something to lose. The car driver thinks he is making a calculated risk (that nothing will come the other way) – but he isn’t actually risking anything of his own.

Just to double check your tolerance levels – you roll up behind a bunch of walkers on a bridleway on your mtb, they turn and see you there then carry on plodding along as they were. You get off and walk too or do a bit of track standing and slow rolling.

1min gone – happy still?
3mins gone – still happy?
6mins gone – not getting a little tetchy yet?
12mins gone – how are those trees and birds looking – still chipper?
20mins gone – all sweetness and light with you?

Well that’s the length of time the op was slowed.

The point is in both cases the walker and cyclist are probably in the right in the strictest sense of the word by some book or other but they have failed the test of being a considerate human being and stepped over the line of being reasonable in sticking to “their rights”. Give and take is what makes the world go around.
Totally wrong – because the walkers would risk nothing by moving aside.

Once more the conversation has drifted into the wrong assumption that the cyclists simply chose not to move on a whim.

A walker can just move without endangering themselves – a rider on a road could very well make the situation much more risky for themselves by inviting a car to come through in a dangerous place. If you can’t see the on-coming road, it isn’t safe to overtake.

The comparison is false.

That run-in to London point is very valid. I said before the race that if Box Hill were ten miles closer to London it wouldn’t be on the course. I guess it needs to be even further away!

How about if they had given him an answer to his question?

As a supposed cyclist, he should already know the obvious answer, but I do agree that it would be better to answer him nicely.

Two separate things:

1. how they were riding (nothing wrong)

2. how they behaved after (rude)

The second one doesn’t mean they were wrong in the first one.

What else should/could they have done?

I totally disagree that there were not other options. They tried to use a nine-man tactic with only five men. Not only that, they laid it down from very early in the race because they were afraid of a split. Apart from that risk they could have mixed it in the peleton in the usual fashion, esp whilst the break was still weak in numbers and class.

Other teams marked the break as it built in strength, as should we (but we were already over-committed and tired).

It isn’t true to say we lack all-round riders either. Even if we did, there is still a point to marking the break.

When this tactic worked at the Worlds the decision was taken on sight of the course layout – had the course been different we may well not have used the same tactics. The Box Hill course was clearly designed to be finely balanced – the tipping of the balance being the size and quality of the break away (and the composition, and therefore who was left to do the work in the peloton).

None of that really matters of course, as he was left fuming by a bunch of tossers, one of whom told him to **** off when asked a perfectly reasonable question. Probably tells me all I need to know re the cyclists

Apart from not telling him to f off, in what way could they have not been “tossers”?

The road was not wide enough. What should they do – invite the car in: “yea – come by, it’s well worth the risk.”?

It’s probably already been said, but even on my own I would ride with enough space to my left for another cyclist. I will move further in if I decide it is safe, and it usually is. But it is 100% my decision – the only thing at stake is my safety (well, and a few seconds’ inconvenience for the driver).

Even if the interviewer had asked a sensible question – like: “Was it wise to decide on the story of the race before the race had even started?” he probably would still have got a rude answer from Cav. The race was designed to offer up lots of possibilities, but GB only ever countenanced one possibility. They got it wrong.

I really hope Taff is a troll.

What exactly is wrong with riding two abreast if the road is not wide enough for two cars plus a bike? If a safe overtake is already going to involve the car using the other carriageway, then what’s the problem with riding two abreast?

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that a lot of people on here only “ride” by putting their bike in their car and driving to the trail centre, or wherever they off-road.

Anyone that thinks cyclists should hug the gutter on the road either lacks experience or is an idiot.