Videos: Brussels couriers tackle the Tour of Flanders sportive – on a cargo bike

If there's one thing for sure, you don't anything about her crash. Her helmet shows a crack, and that's significant. Maybe you think it's no big deal. That's your right, but don't think you're making any informed decision or that you know anything about potential consequences. After having had a closed head injury and going through everything that followed, I can safely say I don't want to ever go through that again. As a result, I do what I can to make sure I get home safe and intact. I understand the physics behind how a helmet works, and I further understand the limitations of helmets. With that said, I'm willing to pay for the possibility that a helmet might dissipate enough energy to keep me alive if for whatever I have to exchange energy and momentum with a car, road, or whatever. As for your handwaving statistics, come back when you understand statistics and all the factors that influence statistical outcomes.

Person who gains financially from the support of a helmet company makes superlative claims for the product they are financially rewarded to wear and promote. Shocker.

If you strap something to your head, and you fall, and the thing strapped to your head is damaged, you can NOT infer you would have died if not for that thing. Particularly when that thing is itself fairly fragile. To make the flaw in such logic clear, if you strapped eggs to your head, fell and the eggs broke, would you seriously be able to claim "The eggs saved my life!!!"? Skulls are already pretty tough things. Hair is also a pretty good abrasion resistant material protecting your skin.

Fast forward to 2050. MTBers and gravelers are riding bikes with tyres compatible with the olde Penny Farthings.

Wasn't the parrot some random parrot that just happened to regularly join Scarponi on his local training ride - not Scarponi's own parrot?

"Helmets save lives in certain types of accidents." They also increase the risk of the most dangerous injury, Diffuse Axonal Injury, caused by rapid rotation of the head. After thirty years of denying that helmets increased that risk, the helmet industry realised that there was even more money to be made by producing helmets that might possibly reduce that risk, MIPS etc. Helmets were sold because people were endlessly told that a helmet would save their life, not by the manufacturers, but by helmet zealots. Since it has been proved beyond doubt that helmets don't save lives, the helmet zealots have switched to saving injury, which they probably do. But they also increase the likelihood of a collision, as helmetted riders have more. The biggest reasons that I oppose such misleading, inaccurate stories like this are that they deter people from cycling because they show it as dangerous, they distract from measures that actually make cycling safer, and the whole cycle helmet promotion thing started out from the worst of bad science, Thompson, Rivara and Thompson, A case-control study of the effectiveness of bicycle safety helmets, 1989 https://www.cyclehelmets.org/1068.html

I'll bow to your superior knowledge of facebook and twitter as I don't use them (and I'm not going to start if your description is accurate) and I'm not accusing anyone of campaigning for mandatory helmets but I do believe we have to reject the regular unsubstantiated claims of their effectiveness.

I got one of the Dynamic air blasters recently, and coincidentally I also use it for getting the difficult to reach coffee grinds out of my hand-grinder!

People do ridicule cyclists for wearing helmets though, go on any helmet discussion on Facebook or Twitter and it won't be long before somebody starts in about "sheeple wearing their precious little polystyrene hats". Many people also ridicule helmet wearers on the assumption that wearing a helmet automatically makes them in favour of mandatory helmets; I do, and I'm not, and many people I know hold the same position but still get shot down as presumed advocates of mandatory helmets if they try to say anything positive about them.

...it goes without saying that it's very sad news for the employees, the business, and indeed those of us who are looking for bikes that aren't lumps of pig-iron for our kids (it's not that obvious in my original post)