Gawd this hasn’t happened to me since I was a teen. Yesterday as I was returning from work with my bicycle, I had one absolutely cinematic bicycle fall, the kinds of which that you just assume have been specifically prepared to make the stuntman have the most impressive drop.

I was on the large area in front of the Opera House and I have my umbrella hanged on the steering handle of the bike. The umbrella was one of those cheap plastic/aluminum ones where they have a hook at the end, so I had put it there to free my hands and I was holding it steady with my hand on top. In retrospect, such close proximity to the wheel was not the best place for an umbrella to be.

As these thing always do, the inevitable happened and at some point the tip of the umbrella managed to get too near to the spinning spokes and “sucked” in to the point where in jammed next to the fork. I didn’t really see that though. What I did see, after a short “I can see my house from up here” moment, was the ground coming up to meet me and say hello. I even did a satisfying grunt when I was ejected from my seat just because the jerk was so sudden.

I managed to land approx 1 meter away from my bike

Fortunately my years as a bumbling youth have conditioned me to fall as gracefully as possible and I managed to put my hands down first which meant that my right wrist took a nice strain, and then fell flat on my chest, which all things considered is not a bad falling location due to the amount of area the force can spread to. The initial pain was minimal and nothing was sprained or broken but I still have lingering pain on my wrist and chest now. Could have been worse I guess.

Of course such an event could not turn out without victims and in this case it was the unfortunate umbrella who dared to investigate the shiny-spinny thingies. After I managed to extricate it from its stuck location, I ended up with a vaguelly umbrella-shaped object which whished to become the greek letter Sigma “Σ” in the next life.

Once I had fallen, I turned around to shake my head at my misbehaving bicycle and noticed that a family around 50 meters ago had stopped to look at the undoubtedly humorous event. They didn’t look for long and moved along as soon as I got up. At this point some young guy approached me to ask (I guess) if I was ok. As I was a bit too stunned to decode his German at that point that is what I assume he was saying, although in retrospect I think he may have been saying “That was fucking awesome dude“. I couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say, so I said what was on the top of my mind at that moment:

“EPIC Fail!”