Seeing as both Owen and SBG had both got themselves shiny new bikes (the former an Orange 5, the latter a Scott Genius), and it was a lovely (rainy, blustery, miser­able) day, we figured we’d go out for a ride. It was a good ride, all in all. We just went for a quick play up Lecky and had all sorts of fun, right up until the very last downhill of the day.

We rode out of the car-park and down the old tramway. I pedalled away like a maniac and proceeded to scare myself just about all the way down, forget­ting that I don’t have gert big Saint brakes on the Cannondale — I nearly fell into the hedge on just about every corner. I came out into the final section (where Brett had the spleen incid­ent back in the day) like a ballistic missile.

Oh, crap, there’s a new jump and I’m doing a million miles per hour! SPROING!!!!

I went up, came down, hit the second one with the back wheel still in the air and then came back to earth. Smoooooth. Quite how I got away with that, I don’t know. I stopped and shouted a warning to Owen who was descend­ing some way behind me. He braked, rode around the jump and straight into the fence. We laughed at that for a while before Séan arrived.

Despite my shouts, he managed to hit the jump at full speed and launched head-first into the ground, spanging himself and firing his bike over his head and into the big metal fence. He then proceeded to scream all manner of profan­it­ies for a short while, before scaring the hell out of us by going into shock and shaking violently for a good few minutes. Thankfully he was just bruised and grazed and in need of a new helmet.

We eventu­ally came to the conclu­sion that he was going to be OK, so I went to pick his bike up out of the under­growth. At first it all looked OK… except the handle­bars didn’t look quite right. They may have been riser bars on both sides before, but now they’re retro drop-bars on the left, with a nice crease in them under­neath the flappy gear/brake lever.

Nice one Séan, that crash was the stuff of legends.