Comment: When tactics to keep dirt bikes off the trails go too far
Taddy Blazusiak’s high profile and near lethal incident where someone deliberately placed wire across the trail, ripping his face apart, raises serious questions for the dirt bike community.
Dangers on the trail are real enough without human intervention. As Taddy Blazusiak horrifically discovered this week, the tactics some people are willing to use to keep you off the trail can be lethal.
A hole dug out, a tree or branch laid across the trail is bad enough but some people take their vigilantism against two-wheels on the trail to the extreme and stretch cables or wires across. Worse still is when that wire is carefully positioned at the head height of a rider. It’s a deliberate, criminal act.
We’re pretty sure we don’t need to describe why this is such a horrendous tactic but, as Taddy proves, the thin wire is invisible across the track and the first you know about it is when it hits you.
The person planting this trap at a height which will catch some one on a bike does so in the full knowledge what it could do. They employ the tactic to deter the rider but do so in a potentially lethal way and in many parts of the world that is a serious criminal act.
Taddy is an extreme and very graphic illustration of the worst of people trying to stop him from riding on a trail in Northern Spain. As he says, if the wire had caught him just a few centimetres lower, around his neck, it could have been catastrophic.
It’s an incident even more baffling given the fact Taddy was riding his Stark Varg and therefore not creating the noise many objectors have against off-road vehicles (with or without an engine).
Not limited to one country
Sadly, it is not isolated, and many people will know of this and other ways in which people are trying to stop us riding.
The arguments against are obvious – noise, speed, dangerous riding, destruction of natural habitats and so on. These arguments stand up but so do the rights of everyone to participate in recreational activities like mountain biking, horse riding, cycling, trekking, walking or indeed riding a dirt bike.
Where these activities all operate respectfully of each other we clearly can all get along. In some parts of the world designated trail networks also work in favour of one group or other but, crucially, allow for each other to do their own thing.
Where there are less restrictions, people look out for each other or at the least know where the like-minded trail users are and avoid each other/stick together.
It’s getting harder to ride
There’s no hiding from the fact it is getting harder to just go out riding our dirt bikes. Across the globe, the open access to trails is getting more restrictive and the simple truth is we have less and less places to ride dirt bikes outside of organised events.
This piece isn’t written to be sensationalist or clickbait, jumping on the bandwagon of Taddy’s terrible injury. More it’s to show there should be solidarity between dirt bike riders, and indeed all off-road users because this could just have easily have been an MTB rider or horse rider.
However you feel about electric motorcycles, and Taddy surely knows how some people feel about them since he signed for Stark Future Racing, this should hammer home the actual point that we’re all in this for the same end aren’t we? To enjoy riding dirt bikes?
Heal up fast Taddy and see you at the races.