Looks like Phil Gaimon’s Worst Retirement Ever has hit the deck hard.
And not in a good way.
Gaimon recently announced his intention to make the US Olympic team in team pursuit for the 2020 Olympics. But his first attempt on the track has ended in a serious fall, and equally serious injuries.
The LA-based former pro cyclist was competing on the track in a Pennsylvania points race when he took a spill; he’s not even sure what happened.
Gaimon was hospitalized with multiple broken bones, including a broken scapula, collarbone and five broken ribs, as well as a partially collapsed lung.
However, in a major show of character, Gaimon said he’s got medical insurance to cover his injuries, and asked people odonate the money they might have sent his way otherwise to his Chefs Cycle campaign to raise $100,000 for No Kid Hungry to end childhood hunger.
Now that’s a big heart.
Let’s all send him our best wishes for a fast and full recovery.
Photo from Phil Gaimon’s Twitter timeline.
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Bad enough when we have to deal with conflicts with drivers. Far worse when race rears its ugly head.
In a decidedly ugly incident, a former Newark CA city councilmember and possible mayoral candidate called a bike rider an Aryan when the bicyclist repeatedly told him to move his car out of the bike lane, as well as calling him, his father, his god, and all other “Aryans” a homophobic slur.
A DC man is on trial for beating a black driver with his U-lock in what he claims is self-defense in a road rage incident that started with a too close pass; prosecutors accuse him of racial hatred, bolstered by claims that he repeatedly used the N-word, as well as an alleged pattern of racially charged incidents.
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Meanwhile, the war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps going on.
Here in SoCal, a man brutally beat a 65-year old bike rider after an argument at a Buena Park bus stop, then rode off on the victim’s bicycle.
After a San Francisco driver used his car as a weapon to repeatedly ram an ebike rider as he was attempting to pass a slower bicyclist, the police couldn’t be bothered to deal with it because he wasn’t injured badly enough. Evidently, when the SFPD gets a report of a shooting, they ask how badly the victim was injured before deciding whether to investigate, too. Thanks to WCoast for the heads-up.
Scary thought. A Brooklyn bike rider confronted a drunken, road-raging off-duty bus driver over a close pass — who may have been on his way to work.
A New Zealand bicyclist was lucky to escape with relatively minor injuries when an impatient, road raging driver intentionally knocked him off his bike.
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Sure, why not.
The president of Turkmenistan demonstrates his prowess with firearms and bikes for the troops in a video that couldn’t possibly be fake.
No, really.
Turkmenistan's president doing pistol target practice while riding a bicycle, because obviously pic.twitter.com/hXYXu70AJ3
— Peter Leonard (@Peter__Leonard) June 14, 2019
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Rapper A$AP Ferg officially drops his new line of BMX bikes made in conjunction with Redline.
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Local
Three month’s into LA’s pilot scooter program, city officials say scooter companies need to step up and do better, saying none of them are currently living up to expectations.
Los Angeles has broken ground on a two-block section of South Robertson in the city’s latest Great Streets project. But can any street without bike lanes ever truly be great?
Coldplay frontman Chris Martin is one of us, rolling out on a mountain bike through the ‘Bu.
Complaints are continuing about Long Beach’s Broadway corridor, as some residents and business owners say the new road diet and protected bike lane have made the street more dangerous, and led to a drop in pedestrian traffic.
In a perfect example of windshield bias, a Whittier letter writer can’t seem to conceive of getting to a Metro station without driving.
State
New walking and biking trails opened over the weekend in the 1.5-mile Bosque and Upper Bee green areas of the Orange County Great Park.
Santa Rosa residents are pressing the city to do more to improve safety on one of the more dangerous roads for bike riders and pedestrians — one that’s already claimed five lives in the past year.
After working for other Bay Area bakeries, an Oakland man has struck out on his own, baking bread at home and making his deliveries by bicycle.
National
A writer for the Sierra Club says trust is stronger than a Kryptonite lock, asking strangers to keep an eye on his bike instead of using a lock. Um, sure. What could possibly go wrong?
She gets it. A writer for Bicycling tells bike shops to lose the attitude and stop treating customers like garbage.
What were you doing when you were seven years old? A Seattle boy and his father are biking across the US, as he attempts to set a record for the youngest cross-country bicyclist.
They get it too. Wichita Falls TX considers changing two local laws, including a “must-use” bike path ordinance, in pursuit of a Bicycle Friendly Community designation.
An Iowa man made his getaway to another state by bike after stabbing another man in the arm, hightailing it from Council Bluffs, Iowa to Omaha, Nebraska. All of 5.5 miles and a 32-minute ride, according to Google Maps.
Republicans in the Minnesota Senate are accused of open hostility to bicycles as a form of transportation, after insisting on removing nearly all references to bicycles from a transportation bill that was passed with unanimous support from all sides in the House.
A fire in a New York bodega is blamed on an exploding delivery ebike battery.
Evidently, LA Councilmember Gil Cedillo has philosophical kin in DC, as a Washington councilmember questions the need for any bike lanes in his district — despite suffering the highest number of traffic deaths in the city this year.
Over 100 bicyclists ride for peace on the streets in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
A Tallahassee FL columnist says bike riders shouldn’t feel safer riding in a big city than they do there, telling local drivers “we’re better than this.”
Horrible news from Florida, where a hit-and-run driver killed two bicyclists in a single collision; police have found the vehicle, but are still looking for the coward behind the wheel.
Mountain biking the hurricane ravaged trails of Puerto Rico.
International
The second Bicycle Architecture Biennale will celebrate the world’s “wow-factor” bicycling infrastructure and examine how bicycling will shape cities of the future.
A cargo bike-riding British Columbia mom says protected bike lanes are key to city transportation.
London’s cycling commissioner says someone will die after councillors from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea pulled their support for a two-way curb-protected bikeway through Notting Hill, based on complaints from a handful of people.
The father of a fallen bicyclist calls for bike riders to be banned from the English highway where he was killed; the local council agrees, saying improving safety would just encourage more people to ride there.
No bias here. Ten percent of drivers violated the 50 mph speed limit in a British village, yet they want to focus on the dangers posed by bike riders zooming by at a relatively pokey 35 mph.
No bias here, either. A Brit commuter was ordered to “get out of this fucking station now!” when he asked for a band-aid for his bleeding wrist, after falling off his bicycle on the way to the train station.
A bike rider in the UK got off with a relative slap on the wrist when he was jailed for just 16 months for fleeing the scene after crashing into a 70-year old woman as she was crossing the street, leaving her with life-threatening injuries. He pled guilty to a 150-year old law against “wanton and furious cycling,” which carries a maximum of two years behind bars.
British cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes are a waste of money, and call on the country to spend income from traffic fines on improving road safety.
An Irish political writer says he nearly became a statistic when a driver cut into the bike lane he was riding in, saying he was lucky this time, but bike riders can’t count on luck. Maybe they should start by lowering the speed limit to a more reasonable level, then try ticketing anyone who violates it, regardless of how they travel.
An Irish County is going to issue numbered license plates to bicyclists, saying it’s for their own good. No, really.
A writer for The Guardian explores the 100-mile Berliner Mauerweg bike trail tracing the route of the former Berlin Wall 30 years after its fall.
Here’s your chance to explore the countryside of lovely Transylvania by bike. But maybe replace that banana in your pocket with a few cloves of garlic just to be safe.
Bicyclists in Zagreb, Croatia will soon get a 75-mile bicycle highway.
An Indian newspaper calls ebikes the next evolution of mobility, suggesting they’re an alternative to polluting scooters and motorbikes.
A New Zealand health and parenting website talks with Julie Ann Genter, the parliament member who famously rode her bike to the hospital to give birth last year.
A Kiwi professor calls for a crackdown on ebike users on bike trails, after he suffered a serious brain injury in a head-on collision with one.
An writer in Kuala Lumpur discovers that riding on the city’s new blue bike lane loop during the evening rush hour is easier said than done.
Competitive Cycling
Chris Froome says he’s lucky to be alive after hitting the wall — literally — crashing into the side of a house at 37 mph when a gust of wind hit his time trial bike. Shaken friend, competitor and fellow Brit Dan Martin thought he was dead after witnessing the crash from a trailing car.
Speaking of the four-time Tour de France winner, the director of the Vuelta a España wants to hand the title for the 2011 race to first runner-up Froome if the doping violation is upheld against General Classification winner Juan José Cobo, to avoid a situation like the many vacant titles in the doping era Tour after Lance, Landis and Contador were stripped of their titles.
Danish pro Jakob Fuglsang won the eight stage Critérium du Dauphiné, finishing ahead of American Tejay van Garderen.
VeloNews attends the unveiling of a Boulder CO monument honoring the late, great Red Zinger/Coors Classic stage race, recalling why it remains a legend over 30 years after its demise. As well it should bento only providing a stage for the best riders from around the world, but also giving women racers a near-equal platform racing slightly shorter distances on the same stages.
Finally…
When your ride to work is great, but the ride home feels like football players have been pounding on you all day. Sometimes it’s not the drivers you have to worry about.
And who needs a marching band when you can ride bikes, instead.
