“You haven’t ridden clipless until you’ve fallen on your face at 1mph… usually in front of a thousand strangers”: An age-old cycling rite of passage still going strong… as this now-embarrassed rider found out + more on the live blog
SUMMARY
"You haven't ridden clipless until you've fallen on your face at 1mph... usually in front of a thousand strangers": An age-old cycling rite of passage still going strong... as this now-embarrassed rider found out
Silent_Tangerine1886 on Reddit, congratulations! You are hereby inducted into the club…
tired clipless for the first time
by
u/Silent_Tangerine1886 in
gravelcycling
This latest rider to go through the clipless rite of passage promised they put some time into getting a stationary feel for their new clipless pedals before unleashing them on the roads but, as anyone here can probably tell you from experience, you’ll still one day end up flat on your side with a rather red face.
As someone perfectly summarised in the comments: “You haven’t ridden clipless until you’ve fallen, basically on your face, at 1mph coming to a stop… usually in front of a thousand strangers.”
We have heard of soe unfortunate clipless injuries but 99% of the time you’ll be fine, the post-fall diagnosis usually just slightly damaged confidence.
I remember my clipless fail well. Commuting in London, a busy zebra crossing packed with amassed crowds waiting to cross. My slowing to a stop to let them cross. The sudden realisation that worn cleat that’s been getting increasingly tougher to get free probably should have been replaced weeks ago. The heart-sinking moment. The last-ditch yank. Momentum taking me over. The topple. The thud. The several concerned ‘you alright, mate?’ shouts. You’ve just got to laugh it off…
Get your embarrassing stories in the comments and I’ll turn this live blog into a clipless support group.
Dorian Godon wins Tour de Romandie stage three
Dorian at the double! 🏆🏆
Dorian Godon capitalises on some great teamwork from Ineos Grenadiers to get his second win in Romandie 👏 pic.twitter.com/IeUkWTYnq9
— Cycling on TNT Sports (@cyclingontnt) May 1, 2026
No sprint win for Tadej today…
Geraint Thomas ponders whether Paul Seixas should go to the Tour de France... "I thought he was too young, but why not?"
Incidentally, G’s assessment of the ‘should he, shouldn’t he?’ discourse around Paul Seixas and this summer’s Tour de France is almost word for word what Ryan just argued for during our latest podcast recording. That episode will be out soon but, as a teaser, here’s the Ineos Grenadiers director of racing’s stance (one a certain road.cc writer firmly agrees with)…
“I thought he was too young, but why not?” Thomas said on his Watts Occurring podcast. “I just wouldn’t have him riding for the GC, although he probably will. The most important thing is that the team tries to downplay it in the media.”
What do we reckon? Should Seixas and Decathlon take their shot?
When you get bored of the indoor trainer
You never really know what other people do inside their homes. pic.twitter.com/H5qj6ZT2LS
— Vatnik Soup (@P_Kallioniemi) April 30, 2026
It’s time to stop hating on new bike things… and just ride your bike
Meanwhile... in the gravel racing world
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Is the UCI prioritising “self-preservation over growth”? Rapha CEO hits out at “ineffectual” governing body as cycling clothing brand reissues ‘roadmap’ to reform
A trip down memory lane... some live blog highlights
It’s my final day at road.cc so, entrusted with the honour of the holy live blog keyboard for one final time, I thought I’d rack my brain and look back at some of the best, most entertaining, weirdest and most memorable days of blogging from the past five-and-a-half years.
Luckily for you lot, Ryan, Callum and Megan will be steering the ship from here on out. If you’ve been a live blog regular since we first set it up way back in 2020, then thanks for reading, commenting, joking, correcting and just generally showing interest in what we do. The show will go on! Right, on with the list…
First up, who could forget that glorious July afternoon at the 2024 Tour de France? A rare day of uncontained joy and positivity for British cycling fans.
From the brilliant to the bizarre, how about that time Chad from the US sent the live blog into meltdown with his no-saddle rides?
> ‘No Saddle Guy’ proves doubters wrong with virtual 100 mile ride (+ exclusive interview)
On a similar note, who needs drops?
We’ve done a bit of everything on the live blog over the years. There have been regular characters popping up time and time again… Jeremy Vine, CyclingMikey… Mr Loophole (*shudders*)… Let’s all have a Friday laugh at this particularly memorable chapter in the (thankfully less attention-seeking and loud these days) Loophole x cycling story. I’ve picked this one mainly for THAT Surrey Police mic-drop clapback
And finally, from my early days on the blog and those weird Covid days, the ‘concerned resident’ that put up signs telling cyclist (yes, just one of us) to ride quietly through their village. No noisy freehubs allowed!
It’s certainly not been boring!
Clip in for some clipping out horror stories
Time for some of your rite of passage clipless fails…
Dan Jestico: “Not only did I fail to unclip once and slowly fall sideways, heading home from work up a very busy Peckham Rye, the bike then fell on top of me such that I couldn’t get my foot unclipped. The strangers who, up until that point, were pointing and sniggering, then had to help me get back upright so I wasn’t blocking the traffic. Every day I pass that point. Every day I remember the shame.”
wtjs: “This was before SPDs, in the days of toe clips and a transverse slot which fitted onto the rear of the pedal. I tumbled off in front of a double decker bus on the Headrow in Leeds. Bus stopped, no injury, just shame.”
So... how many rubber bands does it take to break a carbon frame?
I know it’s the question you’ve all been pondering…
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In response to Avinox power, Bosch beefs its motor output to 120Nm
> In response to Avinox power, Bosch beefs its motor output to 120Nm
'Morning physio': Strava adds Physical Therapy as an activity type
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Strava has added physical therapy to its activity types, meaning users can now record recovery, prehab and rehab as “inattentional, structured training”.
It’s apparently all “part of the platform’s ongoing effort to reflect the full spectrum of how people move and care for their bodies”.
“The balance between activity, recovery and rehabilitation is built into the Strava product, to motivate our users safely. It’s as hard, if not harder, to come back from an injury. With the launch of Physical Therapy, athletes can say ‘I showed up today, I did the work, and I’m still moving forward.’” said Matt Salazar, Strava’s Chief Product Officer.
Thankfully Strava hasn’t gone as far as Whoop which, back in 2024, added functionality to track your… *checks notes*… LSD, ketamine and magic mushroom intake… as well as your masturbating, snacking, COVID vaccinations, marijuana smoking, cigarettes and work calls. No, really…
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@belugabob I've been in a few different hotels in recent years and never had any difficulties with keeping my bike in my room. I always take a couple of newspapers with me to spread out under the bike to stop any drips of oil/water etc getting on the carpet. One hotel even had a nice timber post in the room, for me to lock my bike to. One of the hotels had a secure lock up room for bikes, but were happy for me to keep the bike in my room because it meant I didn't have to drag away a member of staff to get my bike at busy breakfast / check out time. When I went to stay in N Yorks for the 2019 World Champs, the only inconvenience was breakfast being crowded because the Italian Junior women's squad's bikes were being stored in the main dining room! The only slight downer is looking like a bit of an eccentric as I carry my bike down the stairs and through reception in cycling kit.
Another one for the "just because we can doesn't mean we should" pile for me I think, my cheap (£35) photochromic glasses that I use for commuting at dawn and dusk may take 30 seconds to adapt fully to changing light but they start pretty much immediately and I hardly ever feel that they are too dark or not dark enough; if I hit a patch where they really are too dark, sudden tunnels et cetera, one quick hand swipe (same as with these) moves them down to the end of my nose so I can look over the top of them. No precious battery resources wasted, nor the price of a decent secondhand bike.
Great report, sorry, yet another great report, about LTNs which the MSM will instantly leap into action, pens poised, recorder buttons pressed, camera shutters primed, to ignore completely. It's simply not controversial enough. The lurid claims of the anti-LTN mob, of congestion, pollution, danger, plague and pestilence, will however, be front page news. The media in this country actively works against the best interests of the population, with a few notable exceptions: the ITV expose of Reform was good, very good.
This is the arsehole who insisted the Brexit would make the country (and world) a better place. The sooner we stop reporting on any bullshit that leaves his mouth the better.
Undoubtedly this is clever technology, but I wonder about the safety aspect of having to take your hands off the handlebar to switch modes. I get that the rapid response rate improves things to a degree but if I go from sunlight to shade on a poor quality road (of which there are many, as we know) do I want to take one hand off the bar in order to lighten my glasses….? Photochromatic may be slower but will get there without intervention (and at far less than half the cost).
@Rendel Harris - perhaps there is a gap in the market for hyadrationpak.com?
@kingleo I'm sure they may be but Lime's UK profits last year were around £4M; a standard 27-bike docking station costs around £100,000 installed and they have around 50,000 bikes in the capital. £185M would be a big ask for a £4M p.a. operation, even if you could find 1800+ suitable sites, which would be next to impossible.
@belugabob At a certain Scottish branch that shall remain nameless just in case any of Premier's brass are reading we turned up shattered with filthy bikes, when we asked the manager if there was somewhere we could clean them he said, "Ach it's just mud, it'll hoover off in the morning, up ye go!"
@Rendel Harris, I would have thought that the e-bike companies' owners are mega rich; they can afford to put lots of e-bike docks in place. The problem is that they are an outstanding business success; they are too successful, from nothing a few years ago to what we see now.
With reference to a hotel where " You can take your bike right into your room" ... Premier Inn have been doing this for years and therefore have had lots of our custom, on multi-day trips. Not once has any member of staff batted an eyelid - in fact, on one occasion we asked if they had paper towels to clean our bikes before we took them inside, and they shrugged then gave us 2 enormous fluffy white bath towels (needless to say, they weren't white for long.
26 thoughts on ““You haven’t ridden clipless until you’ve fallen on your face at 1mph… usually in front of a thousand strangers”: An age-old cycling rite of passage still going strong… as this now-embarrassed rider found out + more on the live blog”
Not only did I fail to unclip once and slowly fall sideways, heading home from work up a very busy Peckham Rye, the bike then fell on top of me such that I couldn’t get my foot unclipped. The strangers who, up until that point, were pointing and sniggering, then had to help me get back upright so I wasn’t blocking the traffic. Every day I pass that point. Every day I remember the shame.
This was before SPDs, in the days of toe clips and a transverse slot which fitted onto the rear of the pedal. I tumbled off in front of a double decker bus on the Headrow in Leeds. Bus stopped, no injury, just shame.
I unclipped perfectly all the way round my first ride with clipless, unclipped just before home, accidently unclipped pushing over the kerb onto the drive and then managed to unclip just before putting my foot down again. Unfortunately I tried putting my clipped in foot down!!! In a heap on the drive laughing at what the neighbours were thinking.
EDIT!!!
Clipped back in pushing over the kerb…
I’ve never fallen from being clipped in because I’ve never clipped in.
However, I did once fall due to forgetting I was using traditional toe clips and straps. It was right in the middle of a turn lane, with two lanes of 45-50 MPH traffic on each side of me.
Not a cycling story per se but one which greatly exercised many people on the comment boards here at the time, the Wimbledon school crash driver involved in the incident which killed two little girls is now to be charged with causing death by dangerous driving; it seems only right that the evidence should be tested in court and hopefully justice will be done on the basis of the facts rather than what appears to be some very dodgy police practice (four officers currently under investigation for gross misconduct for their handling of the case): https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/may/01/woman-charged-death-two-eight-year-old-girls-wimbledon-car-crash
Snap (on the BBC):
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2026d7586zo
That case is concerning on a couple of points.
Firstly, it shouldn’t be that easy to propose an undiagnosed medical condition to avoid responsibility. While it can and does legitimately happen, I suspect that it’s also used as an excuse, especially where the driver doesn’t immediately hand in their driving license.
Secondly, was it really racism that led the police to not take this seriously?
Whilst it’s hard (though not impossible) to believe that the race of the victims or their families would have influenced the actual police investigation, I’m afraid it’s all too easy to believe (as I’ve seen at first hand on more than one occasion) that they may have been disrespectful to the families and dismissive of their concerns because of their race. All too frequently with the Met in recent years we have seen that officers who on the face of it are deeply concerned and professional actually have very different attitudes that have been exposed through investigations into their WhatsApp messages and so forth. The fact that the misconduct investigation has now been running for nearly eight months would appear to suggest that there is some sort of case to answer, at the least.
There’s some more details here (from April): https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/wimbledon-school-crash-met-police-racism-probe-b2957191.html
Looks suspicious to me.
No surprise that the families of the children affected had a lot of questions. How did the driver know it was an epileptic seizure if she’d never had one before?
Could it be that she’d had seizures prior to the crash and was rolling the dice every time she drove because getting a diagnosis and therefore having to report it to the DVLA would mean losing her licence?
The midday BBC news, I’m told, included the killer’s shyster lawyer claiming that Claire Freemantle had experienced further ‘attacks’ since the fateful day. I didn’t see that and it hasn’t appeared on the BBC News website and it wasn’t mentioned on the 6 PM News- was it a false report or has the statement been withdrawn as a ‘misunderstanding’? This is going to be a very interesting case.
The police misconduct stuff is going to be about police lying to the victims’ families, which must be going on so frequently that it’s almost a SOP, and whether they did indeed fail to breathalyse the offender at the scene or fail to check mobile phone details or look for evidence of a secret ‘in car only’ mobile which is small and can be concealed in the hand. I doubt if the police are prejudiced against rich members of ‘ethnic groups’, because police prejudices are in favour of people in massive uber-expensive Panzers and they’re on both sides of this case.
The fact that the CPS reopened the case and have now prosecuted must be because either they have evidence that she had ‘fits’ prior to the tragedy and concealed them, or she’s been ‘perverting the course of justice’ by fabricating epilepsy by various dubious means since the event. The problem is that you can’t prove or disprove her having a fit at the time of the incident by magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography (EEG) or other test performed since the incident, although having any of those tests for suspicious indications before the incident would assist the prosecution.
The charges are so severe with such a heavy sentence for ‘guilty’ that the defence may feel, with the amount of money that’s behind them, that it’s worth going for a jury trial even if the evidence is strongly against them, because she can just stick resolutely to the modified Scottish Defence of ‘I just don’t know what happened…I have no recollection…’ backed up with the tears in the eyes/ halting voice ‘I will have to live with this for the rest of my life’ dodge.
So, I’ve now checked on iPlayer and indeed the BBC reporter on the BBC One 1300 News quoted at about 13:12 the statement by the above-mentioned shyster defence lawyer that Freemantle had suffered ‘further epileptic seizures’ since the deaths. The lawyer himself did not appear. The interesting feature is that reference to that part of the lawyer’s statement does not appear in the BBC 6PM News- was it a mistake by the BBC reporter or was it a retraction by the lawyer? I now see that these ‘further epileptic seizures’ do not feature in the 10pm BBC News either, although the clip by the original reporter outside the court is still included, but without the ‘further seizures’ bit. ‘Were these ‘alleged fits’ verified by competent observers, or just reported and/or acted out by Freemantle?
It’s a bit late for her to claim that the vehicle ‘just zoomed off on its own’ when she previously claimed she no recollection of the collision (of course we don’t have all these details precisely), unless shyster lawyer goes for ‘the vehicle zoomed off on its own’ and the collision caused amnesia for preceding events. My inclination is that it’s a ‘mobile phone job’ because I have experienced a near-collision myself where I think it’s very likely that the woman distractedly almost driving into me on a mini-roundabout was concealing a small mobile in her right hand while speaking into it:
Some people allege it’s a vape but I disagree. There’s more than enough evidence to mandate obtaining her phone records but…Lancashire Constabulary!
She might struggle with that defence…
BBC wrote:
“Freemantle’s lawyers said the defendant…has “no recollection” of what happened.”
(https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2026d7586zo)
and
“The Crown Prosecution Service said she had suffered an undiagnosed epileptic seizure”
(https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1d96220wyro)
These statements seem contradictory. How does the CPS know she “suffered an undiagnosed epileptic seizure” if Freemantle has “no recollection” of what happened?
Whilst seeing the driver being taken to court is a great step, albeit very late…
I am also very interested to see if the reason(s) for the original “No Further Action” is/are publicised, once the outcome of that investigation is complete.
Mine was in a crowded Bowness on Windermere, at the weekend, at the height of summer. I got my cleat stuck at a roundabout, but luckily there was a bollard for me to lean on. Unfortunately, it was one of those collapsible bollards. So my tumble sidewards was in slow motion. No injuries but a very damaged pride.
Meanwhile, who wants a LEGO road bike?
https://www.bricksup.co.uk/post/lego-icons-11380-road-bike-june-2026
Where’s the dagnammit edit button?
TIL that LEGO are the world’s biggest tyre manufacturer – they make around 306 million tyres a year.
@hawkinspeter steel is real.
On the clipless fail photo, unless it was two fails (one on each side) how did the rider scrape both knees?
Not with clipless but with old-fashioned clips and straps decades ago I loosened (as I thought) both straps and nonchalantly swung my right leg over to dismount, only to find that I hadn’t loosened the left strap sufficiently and down I went face first; having at the point of tumbling both legs on one side of the bike it was all too easy to hit both knees, and I did.
Pretty dumb of those cyclists to ride headlong towards a flock of sheep to start with, but then, having come to grief… he remounts and tries to ride through them again, coming close to hitting a couple of them. What an idiot! If I was in charge of the world, they’d both be disqualified.
I suppose that would be some kind of dictatorsheep if you were in charge of the woold. But yes, they should just be baaaanned
Sheep tend to flock, but capricious goats caper everywhere.
Nearly 6 years after suffering significant head injuries in a training crash, Paralympic hand cycling champion and all-round Motorsport legend Alex Zinardi passed away on Friday.