A disastrous first ride

Last Sunday I took my new De Rosa for a ride through Singapore. My cycling mates and I were just starting off with the Kranji Loop ride. A 70km ride, with quite some hills in a beautiful surrounding. You ride around the tropical forest at the center of Singapore. On some of these stretches you have to be careful not to bump into groups of monkeys that are crossing the road. We were just riding off Holland road and going towards Upper Thomson, when I hear someone whistling behind me. I thought it was someone from my group, so I looked behind me, overseeing a roster in the road. These rosters are designed in a way to suit motor and car tires, but not my front wheel that measures 23mm. No Asian engineer had considered that scenario.


Anyways, 0.3 seconds later I lay flat on the concrete. With my last energy I moved myself up the pavement to avoid the cars approaching. I felt a tremendous pain in my left shoulder, so we went quickly to the hospital. Then came the worst 6 hours of pain in my life so far. However I was very lucky. Nothing was broken and the morphine did it’s job to ease the pain. After 1 night of observation I was allowed to go home again, I recovered quite quickly. The damage: blue shoulder, 2 weeks in a sling (that is blue, where I requested orange) and a wobbling front wheel. This could easily have ended worse.

The 2-0 defeat over Denmark eased the pain further.