Spectator Suffers Spectacular Crash Trying To Ride DH World Cup Course

Darwin Award! makes the pros look good

I hope he is alright and all he is left with is – EXPERIENCE

sending good vibes!

Cisco

Holy sh*t he got rocked. But d*mn don’t we all get hammered like that once in a blue moon? I remember getting knocked out cold many times riding bmx. Viva our sport!

Very questionable choices, but more importantly, I hope he recovers well. Very unfortunate crash.

Cdub, agree completely!

Thinking about this more today, I wonder if the brakes are back to front to what he was used to? Being an Aussie living in Canada, I have to warn people if they borrow my bike that the front brake is probably the opposite to what they are used to.

Just a thought, regardless, hope he doesn’t suffer any long term issues from accident.

Steve Peat tweeted earlier that he spoke to the guy (probably to thank him for the 2nd run lifeline) and the guy has cracked 2 vertebra.
Painful lesson for that punter!
There’s a reason why the pros wear all that protective gear.

It was brayton’s bike so the brakes were probably moto. It’s cool peaty got a rerun but not cool on minaa’s dq

@Ajax

What happens next is that Steve Peat almost ran over his carcass. He got a restart because of it.

@Jimmie – I don’t think they really ‘let’ him go out there, he just took it upon himself to grab the bike and go. What would you have them do? Lock down the course and call out ‘We gotta an active idiot out on the course, take him down immediately without hesitation!’

It’s not exactly easy to communicate with somebody riding down a trail at the same time.

He could’ve cleared them with a FAT bike?

@Jimmie, it’s not the job of the course marshalls to run on to the course and actively take the guy down. Cycling is different from other sports in that you have long open courses that we allow spectators to get right up next to. Your comparisons to other sports make no sense at all. You can’t prevent a determined idiot from doing something like this. There is no way you can blame the organizers or the marshalls (who are likely to be volunteers.)

@C2R, see Brendan Fairclough nail it at about 50 seconds in on this vid: http://www.pinkbike.com/news/video-world-cup-dh-round-2-highlights-2014.html

@AlanM, that’s exactly the job of the course marshal…….to protect the athletes by keeping situations like this from happening. I enjoy a good crash as much as the next guy but Jimmie has a point. That dude should have never been out there.

@C2R there’s a better view of Gee Atherton flying through them at 4:50 in the video Dave linked. The answer appears to be that you launch into them going 100 mph and then magically float through them as if they aren’t actually there.

interesting the bike rumor removed my criticism of them making a laughing stock of this blokes very bad decision… point of origin guess, the police of the world right?!