Rookie Move Ritter

Colorado’s Governor, Bill Ritter, crashed his bike this morning while riding with a group he frequently rides with. The story made it on 9 News (click 9 News for link), in which they report the Governor overlapped wheels with a rider in front of him and went down. Net loss of his crash?…a couple ribs and typical road rash…maybe some dignity.

The Governor was out riding his bike. He was enjoying the Colorado air and mixing it up with traffic on the road, at 6:00am no less. He wore a helmet…all great, admirable things. Overlapping wheels however, that’s a no-no. Every junior racer and group rider hears the speech at some point in their biking career. If you overlap wheels with the rider in front of you and you hit them: they won’t go down, you will. They make this announcement at every training crit I’ve ever been too. It doesn’t stop some moron from eventually doing it, usually when trying to move up in a sprint or when navigating a tight pack, but the warning goes out nonetheless. So I think that when he’s all healed up from his broken ribs, our Governor should spend some time with the CAT4’s at the weekly NREL crits on Thursday nights at the highway patrol test track in Golden. There he can learn:

• The importance of sprinting in the drops
• Not to talk smack to other riders about how fast you were at the MS150 last year
• Which riders to ignore (like anyone in a junior or college team jersey)
• Which riders will crush you in the sprint (usually the hairy legged guy on the steel frame)
• How to hold your line
• When to yell at riders for not holding their line
• Why you should not try and hang with anyone named Pavel
• When not to brake in a turn
• What a goat’s head looks like
• Why we don't really like Australia (damn Australian kids)
• The value of making sure you have your helmet with you when you leave your house
• And most importantly, not to overlap wheels.

Then at least he’ll know as much as the 14 year old juniors and other CAT4’s know, and like them, he can then choose to do with that information as he pleases.