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.