“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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The covid / post-covid boom is driven primarily by failures of capitalist strategy, causing over supply and price gouging. What we are seeing now is the correction. Most so-called ‘Western brands’ bikes are made in Eastern countries anyway - who have long been the leading manufacturers of carbon bikes. Now these makers are becoming brands / sellers too and Western brands have been put on notice. Inflation is driven by greed, not need.
@Benthic A125 motorbike can be ridden by a 17 year old can do about 75MPH; a legal e-bike that a 17-year-old cannot use can do about 15MPH.
The latest moral panic. "From August, the legal age to ride an e-scooter in Ireland will rise from 16 to 18" But, in Ireland you can still drive a: - moped from the age of 16 - 125 cc motorbike from the age of 17 - 3.5 tonne car from the age of 17 So that makes complete sense.
@mitsky I am seeing those Amazon ones in Manchester pretty much every day.
Quite. There's also a demand side story to accompany your eloquently written post, in that domestic demand has dampened from the captive COVID market of a few years back, and less international demand due to tariff-led policies and anti-dumping laws. On Chinese competition, I don't think it's necessarily Western profit-seeking behaviour which has caused increased Chinese supply and competitiveness as much as higher Chinese investment leading to higher quality output, innovation, and economies of scale. I don't know about Chinese frames as I haven't bought one and haven't seen one, but for wheels I don't see any inherent quality advantage for Western brands. Indeed, innovation seems to be coming from Chinese brands along with lower prices, just like we're seeing with electric cars. So higher quality and lower prices.
They should concentrate on the road users who do most of the killing and injuring: car drivers.
I've used the "why aren't you on the motorway?" one before, except here it would be "highway" or "Interstate." The other one I like is: "Get on the sidewalk!" (pavement) "On the side what?" "On the sidewalk!" "So it's not called a side-bicycle then?" Also one I've used a couple of times: "You're not a car!" "Neither are you!"
I've used Challenge, Vittoria, Veloflex and Continental tyres. What stands out for me regarding Challenge is how robust their supple tyres are. Usually there is a tradeoff there, but Challenge somehow manages to keep both.
Well, many of them are more correctly "emit elsewhere". However as we do successfully move away from "coal, oil, and latterly gas and wood" the fraction that is actually emitted does go down. So overall, welcome. (It's complicated... the renewables business is just business like any other so we aren't keen to discuss all the resources being used / new places that get trashed. Example being how much steel (mostly still "dirty") and concrete we need for the new infra. And of course where humans can, they will, as much as they can afford, so Jevons Paradox applies).
RE: Royal Mail 4-wheeled "bikes" - hadn't they been trying to ditch the bikes for ages (like society overall)? When they did they dumped them in favour of vans plus those trolleys. Overall if this means it ends up more "micro-van" rather than "walking plus full size vans" I guess a degree of pedalling is an improvement? When Royal Mail and parking came up before someone said they can ditch their vehicles where they want (if they have to/within reason... but nobody's going to do anything about it). The real issue is all the other commercial deliverers do that anyway. Plus most of the rest of the population...
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.