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USE YOUR NOGGIN

Riding while drunk is for dummies, but so is riding without a helmet.

BY DAN COOK 243-2122

CRASH LANDING: Paul Anderson after the race of his life.

Paul Anderson loves bike racing. Because he wore a helmet in his last race, he will one day race again. Instead of rotting in an early grave.

Full-disclosure time: If you wear a helmet every time you bike, as Paul and I do, then you don't need to read further. As the author of the piece, I'd like to think you'd enjoy reading further. But what Paul and I want to do is convince folks who don't wear helmets to change their ways.

Some people will NEVER wear a bike helmet.

We've heard all the reasons:

"They look stupid!"

"They don't make them to fit my head!"

"They don't make them in the right colors!"

"I can go faster without a helmet!"

Those are excuses, my friends--what me and my new best friend Paul call total bullshit. And you know it.

For those arrogant losers who will never wear one, Paul and I want you to stop reading this article. We don't like you, just on principle. So stop right now. Go read the movie reviews or something. We don't want you.

This article is directed to the 50-percent-of-the-time helmet-wearers. The "I forgot" ones, too. Paul and I know we can get through to you. If we can convince even one of you to wear a helmet at all times, Paul and I will be satisfied.

So here's why I picked Paul as my new best friend.

Through a shameful piece of bad behavior by yours truly, I wound up meeting Joanne Fairchild and Michael Morrison. They are honchos in the trauma services unit at Legacy Emanuel Hospital off Vancouver Avenue in North Portland. The trauma unit there is one of the few in the state. Fairchild and Morrison have seen it all, including brains coming out of guys' noses after they were in an auto crash while not wearing a seat belt.

But this is about bike safety.

They met Paul Anderson when the chopper flew him into the unit on Feb. 29. Paul came to them this way: He's a late-in-life bike racer. Started racing at age 35 three years ago. He'd ridden bikes his whole life, but suddenly, wham!, the racing bug hit him. There are several levels of bike racing, and Paul was moving up quickly toward the top amateur level.

He entered the Banana Belt classic at Hagg Lake and was doing really well, steaming toward the finish line in the pack, well within the top 10, when it happened. The guy next to him tipped over and hit Paul.

That's about all Paul remembers. He doesn't remember his life flashing before his eyes. He doesn't remember thinking, "Oh, my God! Melinda's pregnant with twins and I may not live to see them!" Nope, he fell and it was lights out for Paul.

A photographer was shooting the exciting finish. She captured the horror of Paul's fall. As her motor drive notched frame after frame, Paul went down in the pack on his head, flipped over and went down on his head again.

"We were probably doing 35-plus miles an hour when I fell. My bike just stopped dead when we collided," Paul says. "They tell me I was out for six minutes. I came to when the helicopter arrived. I remember lying there, looking at my helmet. It was actually in pretty decent shape."

Paul wasn't, however. The helicopter flew him to Legacy's trauma unit, where doctors found he'd broken his second vertebra and "mushed" the first one (Paul's medical term). "I had cuts and bruises everywhere. But if I hadn't had that helmet on, I would have been dead. No question about it," he says.

Paul has to wear a neck brace--after all, he technically broke his neck. He still has a lot of scars and scabs from the fall, and there's still some pain. But no paralysis. And he's not afraid to get back in the pack again. Not now that he knows he can fall on his head any old time but won't get killed with a helmet on.

Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration. It is, of course, possible to fall so hard that you could crack your helmet. But that would be one hell of a fall: probably a head-first dive out a 10th-floor window. Paul isn't going to be doing that. But he is going to be racing in July in the Cascade Classics meet at Elkhorn, if his doctors give him the green light.

Although Paul is my new best friend, we have different pet peeves when it comes to the no-helmet boneheads.

"The ones I get really pissed off at are the ones who are training for a race and aren't wearing their helmet," Paul says. He knows they own helmets because all official races require riders to wear them. "Those people know better than to ride without one," he says.

The knuckleheads who bug me are the parents out for a ride with their kids. They make the kids wear helmets, while they themselves ride bareheaded. Great example to set for the little ones.

"Those are some of the toughest cases we see, when a parent on a bike ride with the kids has been hit, wasn't wearing a helmet, and comes in brain-injured," Fairchild says. "Can you imagine how the kids must feel?"

The absolute worst-case scenario for head-injury riding is the helmetless rider who's been drinking alcohol, Fairchild says. "Drinking and riding mix about as well as drinking and driving," she says. "Many times people think they can ride to a party or a bar and be safe. Drunk in traffic is still drunk, and you've got a lot less to protect you in a crash if you're on a bike instead of in a car." (See "Riding Like Grown-ups," below.)

A study in Massachusetts found that the cost of bike-injury-related hospitalization for adult riders has risen significantly there, topping more than $4 million in 1999.

I could cite many more statistics, but the trend is clear: Adults are exhibiting risky behavior when they get on bikes, and it's costing us a ton of dough in higher insurance costs all the way around.

You fence-sitters, listen up: Wear the helmet, and don't think riding to the bar or on a pub crawl somehow excludes you from the term "drunk driver." Or my buddy Paul and I will come after you.

RIDING LIKE GROWN-UPS

Studies show America has done a pretty good job of teaching bike safety to kids but hasn't been nearly as successful convincing adults to ride helmeted and sober. And we're paying a steep price for that failure. Here's the abstract from a 2003 report in Injury, the international journal of the injured, based on bike injuries in Massachusetts:

"The proportion of adults involved in serious bicycle accidents has increased in the last two decades. The majority of the bicycle injury prevention efforts, however, are directed toward child riders.... Massachusetts' statewide injury data reveals a 30 percent increase in hospital charges between 1994 and 1999 for adults following bicycle falls and collisions.... Sixty percent of patients requiring inpatient care at the Study Center for Bicycle Related Injuries were over 16 years of age. Fifty-one percent were without a helmet. Positive blood-alcohol tests were present in [16 percent] of the...patients. Seventy-five percent of patients suffering closed head injury were not helmeted. Adult bicycle trauma is a significant health and financial problem."