Why So Touchy?

I seem to have touched a raw nerve in the mountain biking ‘community’. I’m puzzled that what I thought were mild and run-of-the-mill comments have attracted so much attention. If they over react to what I’ve said, how on earth would they respond to some other comments I’ve heard. I’m intrigued by this phenomenon. It illustrates the way certain groups gather together virtually via the internet to reinforce their beliefs and shut themselves off from a wider perspective. One of the results is a group defensiveness that’s invoked when members identify outsiders who dare to scrutinise what they do. Hackles rise and hunting is usually in packs. There are those on the ‘Single Track’ message board who do try to appear more reasonable than others but even some of them use dismissive terms like ‘pretentious tosh’ and as usual it’s the extreme ones who make most impact. Groups feel more cohesive when they identify a common threat and some go out trying to find one even when it hardly exists: A little collective paranoia can be good for the cause. But just a minute how many of me are there and how many of them? – suddenly hundreds of hits on this blog and a rash of ill mannered comments. Am I really such a threat or are they actually a bit unsure of the rightness of their cause? What an insecure lot.

I’m quite happy to be called an ‘old git’ or ‘a fart’ or ‘a prick’ by people who sign in as ‘anonymous’; that says a lot about the mindset of the people we’re dealing with. It’s tempting to play the same game - but I’d better not allow myself to get pulled into the slime.

I do, though, take exception to being told that I’m wrong when I’m accurately reporting what I’ve actually seen. Some examples of what some contributors have denied: Litter left by bikers: Am I really the only one who has watched as a biker takes a drink from a bottle and throws it over his shoulder? Or were my experiences the only times it’s ever happened? Why was it that the sudden appearance of bike tracks where they’ve never been before coincided with fresh drinks containers found at the side of very quiet paths when there’s never been litter before? Maybe the mountain bikers who chucked the beer cans were slow learning youngsters who hadn’t yet worked out that fizzy drinks aren’t suitable for bumpy rides, but other containers found were of the type specifically marketed to mountain bikers. When I took a holiday in a Scottish glen the week following a major mountain bike event why was it that there were scores of empty drinks containers lying over the wall over a long stretch of the road? Is that the result of an obsession of mine? Or do these people have such certainty that they actually know what I’ve seen cannot possibly be true? And what motivation might I have for making this up? I would dearly like to see more done to help cycling in cities and also more ‘quiet lanes’ in country areas where walkers and cyclists could feel safe. And I would be happy to keep my car to 20 mph to enable this. I’m sorry, but some of the contributors here remind me of the self appointed motorists’ groups who insist that speeding on our roads is not a problem. But perhaps some of them are also just that kind of motorist themselves? I’ll now run for cover before the flack starts up again.