A viral clip leads back to a quiet street corner in Mexico – and a moment that’s more than it first appears.
Every so often, something bike-adjacent pops up on social media and has a little moment of virality. In the past, these have tended to be little portals of wonder: a recoloured old picture of a boy with a wooden bike, for instance, or Chris Froome ostensibly telling Nairo Quintana a ‘yo mama’ joke. But lately, some things have changed.
Part of the blame for this falls on AI; surely it must. There’s something calculated in the way these clips ricochet across accounts – identical posts with mismatched or nonsensical captions, engineered to farm clicks and manufacture engagement rather than explain what you’re actually seeing. Case in point: a recently-surfaced reel that clips together Google Street View scenes of two bike riders, travelling on adjoining streets, crashing into each other on a blind corner as the Street View car goes past. Or, in the words of the post that popped up in my Instagram feed when I was doomscrolling, “a miraculous moment”.
The fact that it involves two bike riders means, obviously, that everybody in the comments section finds it very funny. Laughing-tears-emojis abound, usually in triplicate. We could try to read something more into that about the barely-concealed loathing that anti-bike people have for bike people, as demonstrated in the aftermath of that crash at Milan-San Remo, but in this case we can probably be a bit less stuffy: there are no obvious injuries, it is a pretty amazing fluke of timing, and everyone probably lived happily ever after.
Still, I had questions – and the more I looked, the more this ‘miraculous moment’ started to feel less like a fluke and more like a tiny, accidental documentary. Man on Red Bike crashes into Man on White Bike – that much is obvious – but where are those men? What is it like there? What else is going on around them, beyond this little interaction, preserved in the internet’s back alleys?
Given there’s just a few seconds of freeze-framed video to go on, I thought I’d need to deliver a best-ever GeoGuessr performance to get to the bottom of this, but then I found a post with a clue narrowing it down to Guanajuato, in central Mexico. That turned out to be less helpful than expected. Guanajuato is actually three places at once – a state, a municipio within the state, and the capital city of the state. A bit of Googling revealed that the hilly, colourful city is home to one of those bonkers Red Bull urban downhill races, but as you can probably see from the clip, the crash happened somewhere flatter, drabber: 60 km away in the southern outskirts of the leather-making city of León, on the corner of Valle de San Juan and Valle de Santiago.
The crash took place in October 2018, and such is Google’s diligence to map-making that there are records of what life is like on that corner from as far back as April 2009. Valle de San Juan wasn’t paved then, and the football pitch next to the intersection was, at that point, just a dirt field with tracks through it.
Over the years, you can slowly see the voids in the surroundings getting filled in, a simultaneous process of expansion and decay. Graffiti and rust blooms across almost every flat surface. Regardless of when Google’s cars passed by, it always looks hot and dusty and beaten down.
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