BMX is a dangerous sport. We face the danger of getting injured every time we push down one of our pedals. Without a doubt one of the most appealing things about the sport is the thrill that comes with success with concurring fear, gravity, and common sense. Sometimes it seems as though defeating common sense is our top priority over anything else.
I feel that I can safely say every rider at some point in their ‘career’ has ridden without a helmet. If Darwin’s theory of evolution was 100% accurate BMXers probably wouldn’t even exist.
The conversation of helmets and BMX is a difficult one to have without coming of preachy or condescending but with the sport being pushed to insane new levels everyday and the devastating injury that happened to Mike Aitken it is a conversation that needs to continue to be had until we as a community smarten up.
I’m no saint, I have done a lot of riding without a helmet. Even after my helmet no doubt saved my life the first time I learned to do an endo. Like most riders it took a serious injury for me to smarten up and wear a helmet every session and I am really lucky that incident didn’t take my life.
During my first trip to Woodward, after learning how to flip and doing quite a few successfully onto resi, I hit my head of the lip of the ramp flipping into the foam pit. I actually don’t really remember any of it, or most of that day from about 1pm-9pm when I ‘woke up’. When I was ‘out’ (think lights on nobody home) I didn’t remember learning flips, that it was my girlfriends birthday on Monday, or really where we were. Losing eight or so hours of memory was enough to make me realize that no matter how crappy life can get it’s worth remembering for the good parts after that trip I never rode without a helmet again.
If I could do that much damage wearing a helmet imagine how much more damage I could have done, or perhaps have already done, the countless amount of times I hit my head without a helmet and ‘just got a little concussion’.
No rider is going to force another to wear a helmet, it’s just an unwritten rule. It’s a rule that now I don’t like but I understand, I have been there. I have a lot of good friends who ride without helmets and I really hope to never hear about one of them being seriously injured doing so.
However all it takes is landing a 180 a bit back tire heavy, or a shoe lace getting caught in a sprocket during a roll back to instantly send a rider onto their back and cause their head to whiplash into the ground. Nine times out of ten your might be able to keep your head from making full contact, but that one time your head does hit could be the end.
Sure a helmet might cause you to lose a little “street cred” but to me it’s a more than welcome safety buffer. A helmet can be the difference between a trip to the hospital or a trip back up those stairs to give that rail another shot.
Something to think about.
