What It Feels Like to Get Hit by a Car While Cycling
Hang around enough group rides and you’ll eventually hear someone say: “In cycling, there are the riders that have been hit, and the riders who will get hit.” But the situation isn’t as dire as that adage makes it sound.
Accidents do happen—but not as often as you might think. According to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s records, there were 48,000 bike-vehicle collisions and 743 cyclists killed by cars in 2013; however, the 2009 National Household Travel Survey estimates Americans collectively take 4 billion bike trips each year. Taken together, that means there’s about a 0.0012-percent chance of getting hit during any one ride.
But what’s it like to be that unlucky cyclist who does have a bad encounter with a car? And how does it change you as a rider? We asked six cyclists who’ve been hit by cars to tell us their stories. (These transcripts have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.)
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Jordan Rapp
Pro triathlete from Thousand Oaks, California, hit in 2010
“I was riding in the agricultural flatlands near my house, on this road with a massive shoulder that goes by strawberry farms. It was early evening but it was still light outside and I was on my way home. There was a traffic light about 500 meters away and that’s the last thing I remember seeing. Anything I know about the crash is, at best, third-hand info.
“I guess a guy was leaving work at the strawberry fields and he made a left hand turn right in front of me. I went from 50 kilometers an hour to zero in a second; my head crashed through the window and shattered the glass. You have six jugular veins in your neck; I severed two.
“I was laying in the road, basically dying when a couple of guys from Point Magu Naval Air Station, which is nearby, pulled up. When one of them walked up to me, he thought he saw transmission fluid spilled all over the pavement, but it was my blood. They called for help and a campus police officer from Cal State Channel Islands pulled up. They started using the gauze in his medical kit to stem the bleeding but he told me it was ‘like throwing tissues in the ocean.’ Eventually he stuck his hand in my neck and ‘just felt for something spurting.’
“He saved my life. The ambulance arrived eight minutes after the call, and they said I had maybe two more minutes. I would have for sure been dead without him.
“I spent 18 days in the hospital. And at that point I figured I was pretty much done with racing. I told myself, ‘I’m never going to ride my bike again.’ In fact, I was thinking that I was going to move away because I hated this place. But pretty quickly it became apparent that I needed something to do—I mean, I’d been a full-time athlete. And inside me there was that inner contrariness thinking, Wouldn’t it be crazy if I could come back and race?
“Seven months and 29 days after my accident, I raced Ironman Arizona and I came in fourth. The finish was just overwhelming. It was like okay, I can still do this.”
How It Changed Me: “I’m actually a better athlete now. I’ve won a lot more races and I’m faster than I was. Going through rehab and basically starting over forced me to look at habits I had. It makes you do things the way you probably should have done them from the beginning and that’s made me even stronger.”
Lucas Euser
Pro cyclist from Boulder, Colorado, hit in 2009
“I was doing intervals with Dan Martin in Girona, Spain. We’d started a little bit apart—when you’re a pro you often ride together but don’t do intervals together because everyone has different zones that they have to be in. So Dan was about 100 meters in front of me. It was a 15-minute effort and at 14:30-something this car passed on my left going really slowly. He was slowing down because he was turning right, but he must have gotten confused and thought Dan was me. The driver turned right into me. It was a slight downhill; my GPS had me going about 35 mph. I T-boned the car and basically crumpled into it.
“I shattered my knee cap and broke six ribs. I didn’t lose consciousness but I was really scared. I couldn’t move my leg and I was like, ‘How am I going to do the Vuelta this year?’
“I spent the next month alone in my apartment taking a taxi back and forth to rehab because I wasn’t cleared to fly home to the States. I was off the bike for about six months; that’s the problem with a shattered patella, it just doesn’t heal quickly. I ended up without a contract for the following year and when I didn’t have a contract come January, I signed a zero-dollar contract with Spider Tech. It really hurt my career and I know long-term it will probably shorten my career due to arthritis. I’m now really aware that I won’t be able to do this forever.”
How It Changed Me: “I take a much more defensive approach to riding. I don’t ride with headphones anymore and I try to be really aware of what’s going on around me. It also made me think about my career once I’m done racing. Together with Biju Thomas, I developed a helmet crash sensor [the ICEDot] that can send emergency notification info if you’re ever in a crash. I’ve enjoyed working in the wearable tech world, and that’s something I wouldn’t have discovered without the accident."
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Brad Stulberg
Freelance journalist and running coach from San Francisco, hit in 2013
I live in San Francisco, which generally has a great cycling culture, but the best riding is over the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County. To get there you have to ride through Sausalito, which tends to have a lot of tourists.
I was on my way home from a long ride—probably like a 90-mile day. I was tired, glycogen-depleted, grumpy, and I really just wanted to get home and eat a Pop Tart.
It happened in slow motion. I was riding on the right side of the road and I saw a black Jeep Cherokee on my left. The driver was taking a photo of the waterfront. He drifted right into me, sandwiching me into the curb. I went flying.
My first thoughts were, Am I okay? Is my bike okay? I had some road rash, but other than that I was fine. We didn’t exchange info. He didn’t speak very good English and honestly since it was the end of a really long ride I really just wanted to get home. So I was like, screw it. I just yelled at him for taking photos on his phone while driving and rode home.
How it changed me: I don’t ride through that area anymore. I’m pretty risk-averse and uber-cautious—I’d never ride with music—so these days when I do long rides in Marin County I drive from San Francisco out to the country roads.
Jon Orban
Tech entrepreneur and consultant from Hillsborough, California, hit in 2006
“I had just come back from riding the Iditasport in Alaska and I was out for an easy recovery ride. I was on a road with plenty of shoulder. All of a sudden, I heard a car coming and instead of slowing down it was accelerating. It hit me from the side and I remember thinking, ‘I’ve just been hit by a car.’
“I did judo as a kid and they teach you to fall, and at first I thought I’d gotten away from the crash completely clean. But then a city painting truck pulled up and the driver pointed to my left arm: It had gotten caught between my handlebars and top tube. Pretty much everything was shattered.
“The guy in the painting truck took me to the hospital. That guy, I cannot tell you what a big deal that was. I cannot even imagine if I’d been stuck on the side of the road.
“I had surgery and I was supposed to be out for 10 months but I was back in training in six weeks. My coach had me riding inside with like half a dozen fans on me and he’d rotate ice packs on me as I rode—there was this concern that if sweat got into my wounds I’d end up with a staph infection. My coach was amazing; he got me fit enough so I was able to go follow the Giro that summer, which had been my goal.”
How It Changed Me: “After I came back from the Giro, my body chemistry was completely annihilated. I was gaining weight, and my performance was suffering. In an injury like that your body really focuses on healing and that can throw other things off. So I went in for VO2 max and lactate threshold testing; up until that point I’d always done ultra-endurance-type events, but they told me, hey, you’re a sprinter. From that point on, it was like bike racing became remarkably easier."
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Haley Chura
Pro triathlete from Atlanta, Georgia, hit in 2015
“This year was supposed to be my year. For almost two years I’d been working towards racing as a pro at Kona. Last year was my learning year and this year I had everything riding on Kona. Then, three weeks before the race—so it was one of my last long rides—I was hit while riding in the mountains of Georgia. I’d been riding with a friend on a Sunday morning. He’d turned around a few miles before, so I was all by myself.
“A Prius that was driving the other direction made a left turn directly into me. I was launched into the ditch on the side of the road. It was an older couple and they got out and were like, ‘What did we hit?’ I was like, ‘Me! You hit me!’
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“My first thought was, The rest of this ride is going to be so annoying. But then I looked down and saw my leg and was like, oh no. An ambulance came and luckily nothing was broken, but I did have really deep lacerations in my leg. I had to have both internal and external stitches—it was right on the line where I could have needed surgery.
“In triathlon, Hawaii is our everything. And I had so many people who had supported me and the trip was paid for, so I figured I might as well go. I’d had to take two weeks completely off. The day before the race, I ran for 12 minutes. I started and within 200 meters of the swim, I was like, Oh no, I’m in so much trouble. When I got out on the bike I was just going backwards. After 40 miles I called it a day. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
How It Changed Me: "It made me realize how much power I have behind the wheel. Every tube on my bike was broken—I had no idea that a Prius could do that kind of damage. Imagine if it had been a truck. Now I won’t talk on the phone and drive, I’ve realized that I really need to be as focused as possible on the road.”
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Chris Lyman
Public relations executive from Napa, California, hit in 2012
“It was one of my last training rides before leaving for a stage race and I was descending on a road between Napa and Sonoma. I hit something and lost control for a second on a sharp switchback. I veered into the oncoming lane right as there was a car coming the other direction. It was one of those things where everything went wrong at once.
“I was airlifted out. I had three surgeries over eight days and was in the hospital for three weeks. I broke three vertebrae, my hip, all of my ribs in front. I was in a hard shell back brace for three months. A teammate of mine worked at Specialized and he took my helmet into the helmet lab. They said they’d only seen one helmet that had more damage where the rider survived.
“I actually wasn’t going to ride again. I’d decided it was just too risky. You know, there’s the trauma we do to ourselves, and the trauma we do to our loved ones, and I just didn’t want my wife to worry when I was out riding. She and I talked about it a lot in the months following the accident and she was actually the one who convinced me to start riding again. She knows how much I enjoy it and how much it means to me, but if she hadn’t supported me I wouldn’t have started riding again.”
How It Changed Me: “It made me realize what a community cycling is. The outpouring of support, even from people that didn’t know me, was amazing. And, if anything, this is a cautionary tale that anyone who rides bike should carry insurance. My medical bills came out to a staggering amount—it was about $2 million.”
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