Yesterday I did both, at the same time.
It was about 9:50am in the morning, and I was cruising on my bike to a meeting. It is true to say that I was riding faster than normal, certainly less than the slowest of Tour de France standards, even if you compare it to that one guy who wasn’t taking drugs.
Anyway, I crossed the road in front of the Museumplein (a place often swarming in tourists), turned right and began to pick up pace. I caught out my left eye one of these tourist (you get to know what they look like pretty quickly) people wearing all white, but didn’t think much of it. I smoothly moved my bike out to overtake another rider and then delicately moved it back onto my side of the bike lane. It was than that I saw the tourist again.
She seemed to be turning in my direction, and I think its at this point that I make my fatal mistake. I somehow forgot to consider the fact that tourists are dangerous. Rather than continuing to turn into her lane on the bike path, she instead looked away from me, almost as if she were pretending she couldn’t see me, in the process lining her bike up as if she were the Berlin wall stopping me from getting into West Germany.
It’s at roughly this point that the pain started. I had no time even to brake, to ring the bell, to yell “Ummm, excuse me mevrouw, but could you please watch where the hell you are going”, nope, all I could do was brace myself. What followed was in all likelihood the biggest bike crash in Dutch history, and that is really saying something. My thoughts from this point on can be summarised as follows:
“She really has no idea I’m here”
“There is only very small chance that this is not going to happen”
“Impact in T minus 0.000003 seconds”
“Ouch”
Song plays “Because I’m learning to fly but I aint got wings, Comin down is the hardest thing”….
And it was, there was a bit of a blur which lasted a shuddering few portions of a second, then there was that incredible feeling of “Well, that didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would”, at this point I began wiggling toes, elbows, checking for blood. This whole process however was rudely interrupted by the realisation that I was lying, bike on top of me, in the middle of the road. Quick thinking led to the decision to postpone the checks in favour of a rapid retreat to safe ground.
Scraping my bike up, I made my way toward the crowd, who suddenly made me feel a lot worse because each face had this look of absolute horror. It reminded me of the time I put that ski-lift lollipop thingy on backward at Corcheval, only to be thrown through the air at great speed, upon landing I looked back at Adam and Scott and found they were not laughing, only then did it start to hurt.
It being my first crash in Holland, I wasn’t really all that sure what to do. I was stunned. I had a thousand people talking to me in Dutch, I can only presume saying “Are you ok?”, and I had the women whom I had overtaken telling, well yelling, at me that the tourist was definitely on our side of the bike path (she narrowly missed a similar fate to me) and that I was certainly in the right. Despite this the pain continued.
Looking up, I saw the tourist, whose relaxed ride through Amsterdam had been completely transformed, standing and appearing to be generally ok. Her bike was even upright, and unlike mine, had front wheel and handle bars still pointing in the same direction. She was surrounded by an even larger crowd, probably due to the fact that she didn’t end up in the middle of the road, and was probably understanding less than I was. I asked her a number of times if she was ok, each time she said she was, and she didn’t seem to be anything more than shocked. Her face however was still frozen in the same expression I’d seen just as my waist passed my handlebars and found a moment to briefly look back.
I was really lucky. No one wears helmets in Amsterdam, my head did not hit anything (though, I’m not sure you always remember such an event, its not sore at any rate), my phone was in the other pocket and survived, my wallet seemed to spread the impact evenly on my hip. Really, what hurt the most was the minor damage to my computer, which was on my back at the time, and of course the fact that I will never actually get to see the whole thing in slow motion.
After dusting myself off, I rode off on my trusty steed, making some pretty significant steering adjustments to ensure I didn’t ride in circles, and actually made it to my meeting on time, just with slightly messier hair.
I’m just that little bit more Dutch today.
A Dutch Life 