Incidental Contact Led to Bicycle Race Crash

Four people were taken to the hospital after a chain-reaction crash during the Race the Lake bicycle event on Sunday. The racers were within miles of the finish line when two lead bikers made contact and crashed on a downhill section – where they were going over forty miles per hour. 

Captain Ryan Waldschmidt tells us he’s not surprised that fifteen people were caught up in the crash due to the nature of bicycle racing as a sport because “it’s a very tight group, a very tight pack. They’re all within inches of each other, so when something like this happens – there was incidental contact – it quickly grew into a very big incident with all the bikes involved simply because of how close they all were. There’s no time to react when you’re that close to each other.”

Waldschmidt says the injuries sustained were not “life-threatening injuries, but there were possible broken bones, possible – if they hit their head on the road – like loss of consciousness or concussion situation that they wanted to get evaluated for. So it was those types of injuries from the crash that were transported. And then a lot of them that weren’t transported were treated on scene for road rash and bumps and bruises.”
Waldschmidt adds that the event is well run, and police are necessary for it to actually work. He says “they hire us, so they pay for the law enforcement services. This isn’t coming out of taxpayers funds to pay for it, so they actually hire law enforcement because being that it is a race, they’re not stopping for stop signs and stopping at intersections and things like that – they need to keep moving. So in order to do that, it’s actually quite a bit of preparation and background work. And this is their eleventh annual, so we’ve got it down to a science, they’ve got it down to a science.”

The crash caused the race to be suspended for about an hour.