Bad mind kills cyclist
“On November 10 fourteen cyclists were halfway into our Saturday ride around 7 am supported by police outriders and a van. I heard a screeching noise and bang. Then mayhem. Crushed bikes, fallen, shocked cyclists. I saw one of our cyclists, pitched maybe 40 feet in the air. He landed on his back.
We rushed to him. It was Dino, a regular cyclist. Just then, I heard someone shout out ‘Joe Brown is in the water’. While teammates attended to Dino I ran to help get Joe out of the water. He must have been pitched about 20 feet in the air. A doctor on our ride gave Joe CPR. Joe had a faint pulse.
“Just then, a cyclist shouted that Joanna Banks was submerged in the water. We pulled her out. She was dead. I closed her eyes. I keep seeing her like that. She was new to Trinidad. As an expat, she had no one here. We and BP were her family. The ambulances took long to come. Joe began to turn white. They took him to Mount Hope.
We got a call shortly after. Joe, too, was dead. Dino was badly injured. Everyone is traumatised.”
—Gary Delzin, President of Slipstream Cycling Club.
“Yoga calms you but your cardio is zilch,” my husband said to me last Friday at the bottom of Chancellor Hill.
“Watch me.” I grit my teeth and kept going, past two, then four, then ten lampposts, using deep yoga breaths.
“Badmind yogi,” my husband said, running ahead. I stopped twice. Both times he shouted, “Car,” at me. Both times cars sped up after spotting runners so we were driven to the cliff edge till they drove past.
When we saw Joe Brown powering up the hill, the sky, sea, and hills had turned shades of ink blue in rapidly darkening Christmas skies.
“How do you do it, Joe?” my husband asked the man we’ve known for a decade, upon whose Kevin Costner looks admiring women crushed, at whose restaurant, Jaffa at the Oval, we’ve celebrated anniversaries, birthdays, Mother’s Days, Christmas gatherings.
A self-made man who pulled himself up by the bootstraps, who paid his dues, slept on mattresses until he was cooking for heads of state; who woke at four to exercise, work, and play, who said there would be time enough to sleep when he was dead; a man with a keen wit, who could make a steak tartare look like art; who lived globally but ultimately cooked, sponsored, and loved local, who became one of us.
“I climbed the highest mountain in Italy, and next year I’m tackling France,” he yelled happily into that frangipani scented night breeze.
“How do you do it?” repeated my husband.
“Badmind. Just like you.” He shouted, disappearing into the dark. The next morning Joe was dead. Joanna Banks, another cyclist, dead. Two injured. The others traumatised. The cycling fraternity shattered.
A car ploughed into them. The driver claimed his tyre blew. He lost control of the vehicle and slammed into the 14 cyclists. We may never know. T&T reportedly does not have trained crash investigators to analyse fatal road traffic accidents.
A decade back I fell from a road bike, hurtling over it on the highway, my head bouncing on concrete, my helmet splitting in two. I remember being terrified by a too-close truck, teetering towards it. Some gravel from the highway is still lodged beneath the scar on my chin.
Road ‘badmind’ against cyclists, pedestrians, other drivers, runners, is a real thing. Anybody can be killed on the road anytime. Approximately 70 people died on the roads in 2018.
More than an amendment to the Road Traffic Act we need strict enforcement of the existing law.
Two cyclist on one lane constitute a car.
Allow cyclists at least a metrespace when overtaking.
Enforce drinking and driving and speeding laws.
Most road deaths happen between midnight and seven am on the weekend. Police need to be out in their numbers then with breathalyser and speed guns.
I saw last weekend that there is the ‘badmind’ that is the life force, and the ‘badmind’ of the death wish, a casual brutality that can only be pinioned by the heavy hand of the law.