A cyclist from Hereford has spoken of how he was impaled on the brake lever of his bike after a rat-running motorist knocked him off it.
Dane Phillips, aged 45, was riding to a supermarket on Monday 28 January when a motorist hit the front wheel of his bike, sending his bike into the air, reports Metro.
It landed on top of him, impaling his right leg, which necessitated fire-fighters to cut the handlebars off the bike. He was rushed to hospital, where he underwent surgery to remove the handlebars and brake lever.
He said: “I was on my way to Aldi and cycling the route I’d done a thousand times before when this car came out of nowhere. ‘It all happened so fast, it clipped my front tyre and the bike just flew up 10 feet in the air.
“I was lying on the ground and the bike landed on top of me with the handlebars through my leg.
“At first I didn’t initially realise I had been hurt, and then I saw that the gear and brake levers on the handlebars were stuck deep in my leg.
“The handlebars had to be cut off my bike by firefighters using specialist equipment at the scene and then I was taken to hospital to have them removed from my leg.”
He said that the street layout in the area where the incident happened were dangerous for cyclists.
“It was not a one-off, the narrow streets in Whitecross in Hereford are used as rat-runs by drivers looking to get in and out of the city,” he explained.
“It could have been a child that was hit,” he added. “It was a big car and it could easily have been a fatal accident. I’d just like to raise awareness, in the hope that this doesn’t happen to anyone else.”
While cyclists being impaled on their bicycles is thankfully a very rare occurrence, it does happen now and again.
In 2015, we reported how a cyclist from Leeds needed surgery after his leg became impaled on his bike’s handlebars.
And last August, we reported on the tragic story of a six-year-old boy in the US who was killed in a similar incident after the handlebar tube had become exposed due to disintegration of ends of the rubber handlebar grips.
Born in Scotland, Simon moved to London aged seven and now lives in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds with his miniature schnauzer, Elodie. He fell in love with cycling one Saturday morning in 1994 while living in Italy when Milan-San Remo went past his front door. A daily cycle commuter in London back before riding to work started to boom, he's been news editor at road.cc since 2009. Handily for work, he speaks French and Italian. He doesn't get to ride his Colnago as often as he'd like, and freely admits he's much more adept at cooking than fettling with bikes.