{"id":613563,"date":"2026-05-31T11:15:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T11:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/613563\/"},"modified":"2026-05-31T11:15:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T11:15:12","slug":"unlike-learning-to-ride-learning-to-not-crash-is-something-you-forget-effortlessly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/613563\/","title":{"rendered":"Unlike learning to ride, learning to not crash is something you forget effortlessly"},"content":{"rendered":"

The YouTube algorithm recently spat out a video of Kaden Groves almost crashing on stage one of last year\u2019s Tour de France.<\/a> I saw it at the time, but my mind immediately got swamped with the rest of the Tour, and I totally forgot about it.<\/p>\n

\"Dr<\/p>\n

Multiple national champion on the bike and award-winning author Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week<\/p>\n

It happened like this: an EF Education rider went down in front of him. Groves hit the brakes, and his back wheel lifted a good foot off the ground. Instead of doing as physics demands and falling headlong over the bars, Groves covered a good three or four bike lengths with only the front wheel on the ground. Then he landed the rear, swerved, braked and lifted the back wheel off again, put it back down again and finally swerved again round the fallen rider.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At full speed it\u2019s less than a second. In slow motion, it looks like poetry. My immediate response was uncharitable: \u201cIt\u2019s only bike handling if you can do it twice. Otherwise it\u2019s just luck,\u201d I scoffed. It\u2019s the kind of thing my old-school mate Bernard would say.<\/p>\n

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And it is true that when it comes to that sort of emergency bike handling, genius and panic can look identical. We\u2019ve all managed miraculous saves that were just good fortune \u2013 your tyre<\/a> hits a grippier bit of road mid-skid and you flip back upright, and that sort of thing. You usually sort genius from panic by looking at the outcome. If Groves had bounced the back wheel off the ground a couple of times, swerved, swerved again but then been felled by a loose bike and fallen off, we wouldn\u2019t be talking about handling. It would just have been a crash with an element of comedy.<\/p>\n

What spoils my attempt to scoff at Groves is that in truth I\u2019m certain that faced with the same situation again, he could pull the same move again. Or, and this is worse, maybe he would produce a better move. In contrast, if I got 100 attempts at it, I would die every single time.<\/p>\n

This is the problem with pro riders. They know what they\u2019re doing. Cycling isn\u2019t first and foremost a skill sport \u2013 you don\u2019t become a pro by practising flashy manoeuvres from the age of three, but as a rider develops they almost invariably learn at least enough to survive.<\/p>\n

I do have some talents. But they lack immediate wow-factor. \u201cI can bunny hop a two-foot plank on my cross bike,\u201d you brag. \u201cOh, yeah? Well given enough to eat, by this time tomorrow I can be almost 500 miles away,\u201d I reply.<\/p>\n

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I have tried. I learned to rub my front wheel against the wheel I\u2019m following in a team pursuit <\/a>without automatically landing on my face, for example. But I can\u2019t do it anymore. I learned to hop sideways over kerbs \u2013 an almost essential skill in any open road race. But I\u2019ve forgotten that too, as I painfully found out a couple of years ago when I tried it on a Brompton. Unlike learning to ride a bike, learning to not crash a bike is something you forget effortlessly.<\/p>\n

Other things I can\u2019t do include flicking a dropped bottle out of the way with my front wheel, track standing, and a proper cyclo-cross mount<\/a>. I can sort of do one, but only if I concentrate so hard my tongue sticks out, and I don\u2019t think that counts.<\/p>\n

My problem is I\u2019m too old to learn any of this now. Do I wish I\u2019d spent 1990 doing nothing but learning to track stand and hop a cyclo-cross plank? Of course I do. Do I think I\u2019d miss the chemistry GCSE that I got instead? I mean, I know education is a wonderful thing, but I honestly know which I\u2019d get more use out of these days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The YouTube algorithm recently spat out a video of Kaden Groves almost crashing on stage one of last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":613564,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-613563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-cycling","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=613563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613563\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/613564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=613563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=613563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=613563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}