Video: road.cc reader films moment he says his leg was cut by disc brake rotor

Hilarious riding. Jeez.

did they check the red Spez for a hidden motor too ? thats really weird how the bike seems to be crashing but still trying to go faster than the bike its crashing into.

To me the injury caould have been cause by the impact of a metal projection. Imagaine if the MAMIL had earlier hada puncture and didn't point the QR the right way, that could have punctured the calf much easier.

I suffered a brake related injury on my thigh, a brake lever punctured my skin just enough to make it bleed. A little deeper and it would have been into the muscle.

Man up, it's a flesh wound. Though round disc be better but so is cycle training. 

I'd be less worried about the disc and more worried about riding with such a bunch of muppets.

Wrong side of the white lines, not paying attention and riding in full One Pro kit.
He needs new friends

Amazing the level of pomposity of rsponses laying into the people riding, I'm sure you all were fantastically skilled no mistake riders that never had an off/caused an incident from the moment you got on an adult bike.
there's even one or two (including the author of this piece going by the lead line) that aren't wanting to believe this was caused by a disc...same old.

If you are adding something you as a company are saying is a safety benefit (it isn't ultimately) but injuries albeit rare can be caused and pretty bad ones as shown and the previous method could not then that is a basic failure to appreciate health and safety and go with fad/marketing/profit over H&S.
disc brakes like so many other 'aids' and 'safety' devices lure the users into taking more risk (this is demonstrably proven in all walks of life) in the case of discs it brings in the belief one can go faster at certain points or maintain speed longer/brake later or indeed ride closer because they think they can brake better/faster (more accurately within a shorter distance), all the while failing to understand that human reactions are the limiting factor added on to which tyre limits are also exceeded in their ability to grip, particularly in the wet where discs do have a mechanical advantage over rim brakes.
This results in as many incidents if not more, just like our polystyrene foamed lucky rabbitsfoot.

I don't think any company issuing disc brake equipped bikes has any responsibility to riders, other than them working properly.  Chainring manufacturers don't have any responsbility to ensure people don't get gouged by them or wheel manufacturers have any responsibility to ensure fingers aren't put in them.

If you fall off your bike there are a myriad of bits to injure you. I remember falling of my MTB and getting a bar in the groin area. Best solution was to not fall off. Pedals down shins, stems to the nuts, seat up the backside at speed. Don't crash. It's a bit like complaining your face got cut with glass after you put your car into a tree.

Maybe they will need to re-design road discs by increasing rotor diameter to create a fatter outer edge beyond the swept area  so less able to cause lacerations in similar circumstances to this. 

This sort of group riding carnage reminds me why I usually ride alone..

The MTB analogy is an interesting one but if we give it some thought do we ever ride consistently in close pack formation on our MTBs like these guys on the road?- I'm not sure we do.

Yorkshire wallet wrote:

If you fall off your bike there are a myriad of bits to injure you. I remember falling of my MTB and getting a bar in the groin area. Best solution was to not fall off. Pedals down shins, stems to the nuts, seat up the backside at speed. Don't crash. It's a bit like complaining your face got cut with glass after you put your car into a tree.

Bar-end into groin - check

V12 with additional pins installed, down shin - check

Stem to nuts (also once into chest - don't ask) - check

Saddle point into anus at speed - check  - and that really f**king hurt!

I also went into a hawthorn bush head-first like a spear at speed once, I had to ride about 15 miles home, looking like Pinhead from Hellraiser with a trickle of blood from about two thousand tiny wounds!

I really don't miss MTBing...

The group riding skills could maybe do with improvement, but Mr. Curtis-Brown is clearly a much tougher individual than myself. If it had been me, suffering that injury, the last ten seconds of the video would have been accompanied by the kind of high pitched screaming that is stereotypically associated with little girls.

Yes, there are other sharp spinning objects on bicycles (chainset, cassette, maybe aero-spokes) and bigger dangers out on the roads (potholes, motorists) but that is no excuse for introducing a new source of danger.

If you want an equally pointless "debate", head over to Pinkbike for 29ers vs 27.5 - or for the zealots, #26aintdead. Or maybe "do we need another axle standard", although most people are in agreement that we probably don't need Boost now that we've decided that 27.5+ is actually a bit shit.

Disc brakes are better for more people more of the time. 

The problem with safety tech is that if it works, you don't actually know if it works. You can't usually say, that some party would have died if they weren't wearing a seatbelt, or their car didn't have an airbag. You can postulate, but that's as far as it can go. Safety statistics on tech are mostly estimates:

https://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/esv/esv18/cd/files/18esv-000500.pdf

However when tech fails us, you can quite easily attribute that infjury to the tech itself. Which makes debate almost futile as people wishing to deny a technological achievement have a get-out-of-jail-free-card.

"Airbag Related Injuries and Deaths

During the past decade the motoring public has been shocked to learn that air bags, a life-saving device promoted by the automotive industry, can also induce severe and fatal injuries. Over the last 10 years in the United States, nearly 200 men, women and children have been fatally injured by deploying air bags. Thousands more have sustained serious nonfatal injuries, including cervical spine fractures, closed head injuries, and multiple fractures and amputations of digits and hands. Ironically, the vast majority of these serious and fatal injuries were incurred in low and moderate speed collisions in which little or no injury would have been otherwise expected."

http://what-when-how.com/forensic-sciences/airbag-related-injuries-and-d...

If a car slams on the brakes in front of me in the wet id be very happy to have the extra stopping power of discs.

That's pretty conclusive.  Disc equiped bike rides too close on the right side.  Persons right calf has a semi-circle shaped gash and front disc is covered in blood.  Go so far as DNA test the blood if you like - it's the injured riders blood.

So how did the blood from the injured rider get onto the disc rotor?  Out of the gash in the injured riders leg.

How did the gash occur?  An invisible fairy jumped out of the hedgerow just as the disc rotor was about to slice the riders leg.  The fairy made a brave attempt to parry the thin spinning metal disc with his sword but his sword glanced off the rotor and sliced the riders calf.  The fairy skulked off to practice his swordmanship.

That's the only thing I can think of that sounds more ridiculous than 'It was _not_ caused by the disc rotor'

The MTB comunity has been using disc brakes for years without this nonesense. In group rides you just need to watch where you are going.  Clearly the rider not the equipment .

I like the guy in yellow, the first guy to almost get to his brakes. He's wearing running shoes and has flat pedals?

Disc brakes are safer in non-competitive environments, but have the ability to be less safe once the red mist descends. 

Its not the discs fault, but the riders. 

Safer, better braking means later, harder braking, which means smaller margin for error. In a bunch that is already pushing the envelope around braking this will cause more accidents, not less. 

However, anyone saying that discs are, in general use not safer, better braking are deluding themselves. Everytime I go MTBing, and commute back down the hill home, I am reminded at how much confidence and control disc brakes provide on the road. They are great. 

Diddums. What was someone with such hairy legs entering a triathlon for in the first place?

Haha, nicely 'staged' accident... What a load of bollocks... Give it up ffs and write about something else... And no, not f'ing doping. Sick of all this shite

There's no pride in wound repair these days! Poor skills....

I fell off my bike going over a bridge. Bridges are dangerous. 

A local boy lost the sight in his eye caused by the handlebar. Handlebars are dangerous. 

A cycling buddy smacked his nuts on the seat. Seats are dangerous.

i choked on a pea. Peas are dangerous.

Or....it was really wet. A dog ran out in front of me. I put on my disc brakes and stopped. Not dangerous.

end of.

martyn

Just noticed...at 25seconds look at the guy on the Speshulized...he's more interested at  looking at the pedestrians than whats going on in front!

What I really dont' understand is how chainrings are so much less dangerous, how there aren't regular photos and videos of people's injuries from chain rings and for calls for them to be banned. I think it's really well established that spinning discs applied to skin are really unlikely to cut of their own nature (sharpness etc) and that it's really a (not fully confirmed) issue of narrow metal object impacting against skin at (in this instance) moderate velocity. 

As for those that figure that disc brake injuries haven't figured in CX and MTB because they don't feature multi rider stacks, they're obviously watching a different CX than me, and it really only takes one disc to ostensibly do the damage, so simple one on one crashes it would seem to me are going to do it, unless of course discs aren't really to blame; though I hasten to add in this praicular case it does seem likely. Multiple of anecdote does not = evidence though!

I notice that in the video the sun is on the right and it is overcast. Also the road surface at the site of the incident is grey and rather broken up at the edge.

Then the picture of the disc with blood on it is in bright sunshine with shadow to the right i.e sun on the left with an unbroken road surface in the background which is also a different colour (possibly due to the lighting). If the bike had been moved any distance from the crash site then the rotor would have been cleaned.

If the bike is simply pointing back the way they came then the guy holding it is standing in the middle of the road with camera between the bike and the verge.

I'm questioning wether the bloodied disc brake image and video were taken at the same time at the same site. I'm also finding it strange that the injured rider does not so much as mutter an expression of pain and nobody says anything along the lines of "Dude, look at your leg!"

Go Go CSI conspiracy theorists.

Aaaahhhh. Whether you like disc brakes or not the argument that parts of the bike are already dangerous... SO, WHY NOT ADD SOMETHING TO THE BIKE THAT MAKES IT MORE DANGEROUS IS ABSURD! SINCE THE BIKE HAS A DANGEROUS CHAINRING, ADDING SOMETHING TO MAKE THE BIKE MORE DANGEROUS IS OKAY! I can't believe bike insiders are saying this! Shouldn't the line be... Since the bike is already dangerous we should do what we can to make the bike as safe as possible? What is wrong with people?

Maybe glasses or some group riding lessons are required..