This post is dedicated to the memory of Wouter Weylandt, who died yesterday in a solo accident during the Giro d’Italia stage race. The best description of what happened is that Weylandt was descending and looking behind him to see what riders were following when either his pedal or handlebar clipped a low stone wall on the left side of the road, stopping the bike in its tracks and catapulting him across the road and into another stone wall. All attempts at reviving him were futile.
This was one of the top cyclists in the world, a great bike handler, racing on a road closed to traffic. Even under the most ideal circumstances, the fragility of cycling shows itself.
In trafficked space, equality of use notwithstanding, no one is more vulnerable than a cyclist. Pedestrians move too slowly to hurt themselves that often; usually they have to be struck in order to be injured badly and they don’t (or shouldn’t) spend that much time in the actual street. Vehicles, while traveling at sometimes dangerous speeds, nonetheless are designed to protect occupants during accidents. As vehicle safety has increased over the years, motor vehicle crashes that result in serious injury or death have fallen dramatically.
Cycling, on the other hand, combines the most dangerous features of pedestrians and vehicles: the vulnerability of the walker, and the position on the road and much of the speed of an automobile. Far more agile than a car, the bicycle is still not nearly as agile as a pedestrian, not nearly as able to get out of harm’s way quickly. Without question, cyclists risk the most on the road.
So if cyclists feel as though they are defending a lifestyle against long odds, this is the reason. No one has more at stake on the road. As indignant as drivers might sometimes be at their presence, the close calls and brush-bys that cyclist endure might damage the finish on a car or put a dent in a quarter-panel – they’ll send a cyclist to the hospital. If there is a sense of entitlement to the road on the part of bicyclists, it comes from nowhere more fully than here.
Which begs the question: why ride? Or at least, why ride crazy? I’ll ignore all the great economic and environmental reasons to ride. Certain activities, it seems to me, are almost genetic in nature. Put me on a bike and I will happily work away for hours. Turn it into a field sport or swimming or something and I’m done in half an hour. From all I’ve read of Wouter Weylandt, he simply loved to ride, and for people like that, like me, nothing can substitute.
So riding crazy then; why do some cyclists take so many risks in traffic when the stakes are so frightfully high? Rebelliousness, the flow of the ride, habit … nothing would seem to justify the horrific potential of getting hit in traffic, so I won’t try. All I will ask is that drivers not punish riders through the use of their cars. If you watch a cyclist blow a red light in traffic and it gets under your skin, please do not pass them with only inches to spare to show your disapproval. Whatever they do isn’t enough to justify them ending up under your bumper, even if you have no intention of your actions leading to that. And if ‘justice’ catches up them, may it be in the form of a police officer or maturity and not a life-altering injury. Maybe they’ll take up racing and get their speed ya-yas out in a legitimate form. Maybe they’ll turn out to be as warm and considerate a person as Wouter Weylandt was in his short life, and may they have a longer life to be that good person. Please give them that chance.
Rest in Pease, Wouter Weylandt.
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