How does one not fall off their bike and by riding closely to another bike cut their LEFT leg on the disc brake of another bike?

Yea I'm calling bullshit that the "cut" was made by a disc. Especially since he is claiming he was still riding... The injury doesn't match the supposed mechanism that caused it

Via pileups like this. It's a cluster of bikes and limbs. (and motos)

pic.twitter.com/pGPFmRfFvf

That's the same question I've been asking...

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It has to be a BS description.

To get your bike close enough you have to be inside the handlebar width, have no pedal interference and no hands on your bars (or theirs) and nobody in a seat.

I went down the basement and tried to line up two bikes. They would have to have the bars over the cross bar, and over the wheel, assuming there wasn't a body on either bike. Add to that to get a shin anywhere near the front or rear required that your pedal was inside the spokes. What sort of rider keeps pedaling in those circumstances.

There is something missing from all this.

Last night after all the discussion I examined the discs on my 2 mtb and 1 cross/commuter/road bike. All sharp edges to my touch and I would expect to receive a cut if I came into forceful contact with the rotor during a crash.

Doing a bit of research there are some standard methods to determine sharpness. UL1439 was the first I came across with a standard test method and commercially available tools: Essentially a layer or two of tape is rubbed across the edge and then inspected for cutting.

https://sharpedgetester.com/...les/tool_in_hand.jpg

If he was a hockey player he would have finished the race.

Hockey players don't "throw themselves into the grass" and "cover their faces and hands in shock and disbelief." Such drama!

As a guy who races at a professional level and experiencing the accelerations and decelerations of NRC crits and mountain descents with 200 guys I would have to disagree with your "remarkably poor" assessment of carbon rim braking. My brakes work great! I can smoke the tires right off the bike before I lose purchase on the rim. In the rain, things require a bit more finesse but most of the trouble is still with traction on the road and not with the lack of brake power. In fact, I think the power of discs in the wet could throw your bike down really quickly in a rainy crit.

In summary, I think discs lack any big time benefit in racing performance and are detrimental in terms of weight, aero, pain in the ass factor and now injury risk. People compare the cutting hazard to the risk of flying chainrings in a crash and I agree. Why add two more sharp spinning (and heated) edges to the mix in mass crash?

They might be a fun toy but they don't belong in high level racing.

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i dont buy the description of events, especially when the rider himself claims he didn't notice it immediately.
physics and simple measurements don't support his apparent version of events.

Yip, it just doesn't seem possible to still be on your bike and have your left leg cut by a disk (on the left side of the bike you are hitting). I feel he has just jumped to conclusions on how he got injured

Just posted this in the other thread....

OK, those pics help.....guess I can see a scenario where this happens now. Rider in front skids / falls of slightly, bike pointing off to the left and leaning down towards Ventoso as he approaches. Ventoso, skids / stops but veering to the right, so his left leg is sliding towards a disc which is now angled up at him...voila, it catches the side if his calf next to his shin and lifts the flap of skin up.

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I still don't see it, the rim would come in to contact with body or bike first and prevent the disk from hitting you

It's also not uncommon to pile into each other with blades that are far sharper than any discs.

with good reason....

Not. I think disc brakes on road bikes are stupid, but not because they are dangerous. That's just silly.

I severed a hamstring tendon in a pileup at the Manhattan Beach Grand Prix a million years ago. Still missing that tendon. Thank you 3rd world medicine! For that expensive ambulance ride and nothing done at the hospital except apply stitches.

Apparently someone's chain came off and the big ring did it. Now, those suckers are *really* sharp. Should have been outlawed long ago. Why aren't we on shaft drive and automatic gears like any civilized vehicle?

I disagree completely.

The reasons for worse performance in terms of weight & aero come down to being a relatively recent technological development; given several more years of development, you'll see them become somewhat more practical in these areas (really, they'd probably be just as, if not more aero, than caliper brakes if a bike incorporated an integrated fairing in front of the disc caliper to direct air around it, just like what is done for caliper brakes on many super bikes)*. Additionally, who wouldn't want to save seconds on their time by being able to reliably and certainly brake quicker before a turn?

You cannot cite their hydraulic nature as a disadvantage (PITA factor) due to the emergence of the hydraulic rim brakes currently found on some superbikes and it's prevalence on MTB systems; the technology is very reliable and stable (assuming proper setup), as MTB systems have shown, and allowed for superior modulation of stopping power and cable management on tri systems. The fact that good disc calipers necessitate hydraulic lines are nothing but a positive.

Most new bike technologies have been met with accusations of being unsafe and therefore unworthy of development (carbon frames, aerobars from what I can recall). By this logic, we should all use Rohloff speed hubs and belt drives. The discussion in this thread even shows that the disc brake being at fault for the injury isn't certain.

The biggest flaw in reasoning against the disc brake, especially for tri, is the reality that caliper rim brakes slowly destroy one of the most expensive components on the bike. The fact that disc brakes would offer reliable braking performance without causing wear to a several thousand dollar wheel-set, is by it self, the single biggest reason to be pro disc, keeping in mind that this will be the case regardless of weather, road conditions, or rim material. Without the constraint of a rim brake track, who knows how much more aero Zipp et al. could make a set of their TOTL wheels? Additionally, many AGers who spend thousands on wheelsets wouldn't see their purchase evaporate in to thin air the moment delamination occurs on the brake track (I shudder to think how I'd feel if I put a ruler to a set of H3s and found the braketrack to be somewhat concave and close to useless).

There is really no reasonable argument that has been put forward that demonstrates that discs are not the way forward when it comes to bicycle braking technology.


*I recall some testing done by Specialized a few years ago wherein they found that disc brakes offered no great aero disadvantage vs. rim calipers, but I might be misremembering the article.

Still doesn't pass the smell test, in order for the left front of his lower left leg to hit an object mounted in the left center of either wheel of another bike doesn't seem possible without a pileup collision, not a I didn't fall and all of a sudden I have a gash colliision. Now if they were jousting, we have a probability of contact, so I spose it is possible that he's right.

What looks more possible given the photos provided is he smashed into the cassette of another rider, the injury pattern and what appears to be black residue would support that as well.

Yip... The rider is just using this injury as a way to voice his own opinion on discs. Unfortunately for innovation the uci have listened. I hope it comes out that it wasn't discs that caused it

I rekon he slashed it open on a garmin pod of a power pedal.
Easy to see how this happens, rides in close to the other bike while they are still pedaling and the gamin pod sticks out straight at his leg as the other rider is on the back part of the pedal stroke.

Ban garmin pedal pods.

It could even have been contact with a tyre at speed, it's a rip not a cut.

This is all just a disc beatup.

I don't think that comparison holds up to scrutiny.
Disks were functionally desirable for MTB due to specific shortcomings of rim brakes (mud clearance, don't work on damaged rims, poor performance when dirty, etc). Having experienced good disk brakes, many of those riding cyclocross and road bikes are not content with the performance of their brakes and want to have the benefits seen to be provided by disks.

Electronic shifting does not fill a gaping gap and I think is very clearly a "nice to have" feature. Whatever accusations you throw at marketing, at least take responsibility for your own choices. I bought 2 new bikes and a new set of race wheels in the last 2 years. One road, one tri. Neither has electronic shifting or carbon rims. I don't see any major benefit to Di2 so it wasn't worth the money to me. I didn't want to compromise on braking for the sake of a small weight saving so I got a set of Swiss Side Hadrons with alloy braking surfaces. marketing may lead you to water but it can't make you drink.
If I could have had a mature disk brake design on these bikes I would have gone that route.

They also happen to wear a crapton of hard plastic protective gear.

As for the "discs are dangerous" argument....not quite buying it. Biking on the road is extremely dangerous, should we just move on to velodrome racing? Racers get hurt on all sorts of things. Sure, a rotor is one extra thing but I still can't see the rotor as very likely to injure someone often enough where it would make sense to not use it. I don't have data supporting my claim....but Ventoso also doesn't have data supporting his claim that they're inherently dangerous. He's got a single point of information, an anecdote, and a shin that may or may not have gotten cut by someone's rotor.

Yup.

And if we're making a parallel to the infamous Duke Lacrosse rape trial, TomA is Nancy Grace. :)

you make good points about the wear of breaks on expensive carbon wheels. But, for me...

Even though I ride in the mountains. I use my race wheels for - racing. As a triathlete my goal is to use the brakes as little as possible. Even on a hilly course such as Wildflower LC - I'd expect to brake so little that my wheels would not wear out in 10 of my lifetimes of racing. So, as a practical matter wearing out the rim is not an issue, nor is brake performance (I want to keep my loss of watts as low as possible). In a Mountain Bike race - much different animal. Braking late and fast into corners, etc. can be the difference between winning and losing.

Interesting discussion, though.

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I saw this on a white board in a window box at my daughters middle school...
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1. __________
2. __________
3. __________

And that's a guy who sells disc-braked road bikes (or at least: his name is on them), and stands to make a profit when road cyclists adopt discs.

ETA: out of an abundance of caution, I'm afraid I've got to pull this one. Sorry.

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Carl Matson