Revolutions Rideout - 31st August

[Lissa]

I wasn't going to respond to kwh's posts, but on reflection, I think I will.

kwh, you may indeed have Seggons best interests at heart, but I like many others thought your posts on Seggons initial video thread were a bit off. Offer advice, yes, but linking to all the threads on other sites just came across to me as a deliberate attempt to humiliate. I don't know how they act on other forums, but we don't set out on org to deliberately humiliate anyone. There are ways to discuss people's problems, and that wasn't it.

I also didn't like your assumption that nothing was said to Seggons after this incident. It was. He was made fully aware of just how fatal it could have been.

There are many people on here, my other half being one of them, who are strong advocates of further training, be it Bike Safe, IAM or Rospa. But who are we to order anyone to do these schemes? We can only advocate them.

[fizzwheel]

Originally Posted by kwh

when none of his "friends" could be bothered?

Yes, but you dont know that do you.

I had a natter with Seggons on the Ecosse rideout about one or two things I also thought his riding was much improved from the youtube videos that you refer to.

We all make mistakes now and again, and we all have something to learn from every ride we go on. Being a new or inexperienced rider means sometimes a steep learning curve so perhaps your orginal comments were just to much to take in for a young person venturing out in the big bad world on his bike.

Perhaps this was just a momentary lapse of concentration, as said above he was out that day with a bunch of experienced riders and I know those that were out with him would have spoken to him about what he'd just done.

Every .org rideout I've been on nothing but respect and well being for others has been shown, I doubt this one was any different, if you werent on the rideout then you wont know what was said before during or after this incident. All your basing your posts on is a couple of videos, you cant judge one mans riding by this incident alone.

I realise you have his best interests at heart, nobody likes to see another rider struggle or make mistakes or put themselves at risk.

Its difficult to pass comment on anothers persons riding without sometimes it being recieved poorly I've seen it happen and I've seen it be taken the wrong way. I think that somewhere in all this Seggons has actually admited he made a mistake, so he's on the path to fixing the problems and not repeating them, if you'd give him a chance rather than ramming things down his throat ( whether you feel you are or not this is how your posts come across )

Originally Posted by Lissa

I wasn't going to respond to kwh's posts, but on reflection, I think I will.

kwh, you may indeed have Seggons best interests at heart, but I like many others thought your posts on Seggons initial video thread were a bit off. Offer advice, yes, but linking to all the threads on other sites just came across to me as a deliberate attempt to humiliate. I don't know how they act on other forums, but we don't set out on org to deliberately humiliate anyone. There are ways to discuss people's problems, and that wasn't it.

When I found the thread, by Googling for the Youtube URL having come to it from elsewhere on the internet and boggled not just at the basic riding errors displayed, but the wholly incorrect "lessons" that Seggons had "learnt" and then added to his video as captions, basically misdiagnosing the entire episode and therefore not getting the point at all, it was if you will remember a good couple of months after it happened. When I read the entire thread, I was quite dismayed by the lethally poor quality of the feedback that Seggons had been given. Not only had he failed to understand why he had crashed three times in five minutes, but nobody had sought to accurately inform him, and there had effectively been no correction posted of his mistaken assumptions, no (accurate) discussion of what he could do to ensure that it didn't happen again, and there were people nodding sagely and validating Seggons clearly incorrect self-diagnosis. Having looked at the remainder of his videos, it was clear that nothing had changed in his riding since the incident, and that he obviously hadn't himself identified any need for a fundamental root and branch change to his riding, or that his life was seriously at risk if he continued as he was.

I had no interest in humiliating the bloke - it wasn't like I was poking fun at his ears or the size of his nose, for a start - it's nothing he couldn't make major inroads towards fixing very quickly if he was sufficiently motivated, and if he was well enough informed. My first post (I'd have to go and look at it now to remember what I said) was almost certainly meant to make it clear to a rider whose video, skills and survival prospects the internet riding community had already judged at great length, but whose home forum had apparently not at the time, that he had a serious problem and that he needed to do something right now to fix it or he would kill himself and/or others. And then I was surrounded by a crowd of forumites who accused me of being beastly to young Mr Seggons, so I posted a load of links from elsewhere to try and make it clear that it wasn't me being beastly, it was riders all over the world watching and judging, and the consensus of all of them saying many of the the same things.

Then people told me that I was saying it in the wrong way, so I started privately telling Seggons that he needed to sort out some training, but he didn't appear to be interested. I did play by play analysis of a couple of his rides from his videos, trying to make him understand that he had a critical skills problem that he needed to solve before he died of it. As I discover, I wasted my effort because he had put me on ignore.

His videos show that three months later he hasn't changed the way he rides at all, and he hasn't apparently acquired any new skills or knowledge, that he consistently rejects high quality advice from any and all sources, presumably because it conflicts with the abysmal quality of advice he gets round here, his posts show that he hasn't apparently participated in or even arranged to participate in any kind of remedial training, and now it seems he has had exactly the same kind of 'Russian Roulette' incident again where he is incredibly lucky to have survived unscathed.

Even after cheating death again, still people appear on here appear to be joking about it or (idiotically, moronically, fatuously, ridiculously) telling him "He did the best thing". Is there no point at which anybody is going to point out what he actually did wrong to him or tell him that his life depends on acquiring some essential basic riding skills that he currently does not have? I hear it suggested that people actually had this discussion with him face to face. All I see is pictures of people pointing at his rear tyre and smirking, joking about it, and Seggons making light of the whole thing or implying that I'm just trolling.

The final nail in the coffin this time was that despite not giving Seggons any useful advice on here, somebody who must have some kind of advanced riding background along the line has obviously actually told him to try 'offsiding'. What kind of person offers no useful riding advice but instead suggests trying 'offsiding' to somebody who cannot chose a sensible road position to save his life, nor knows how to countersteer to get back on his own side of the road in an emergency?

That's not life saving advice, that's assisted suicide!

Anyway, my initial aim wasn't to humiliate anybody. It was to save a life. I didn't invent thousands of riders around the world pointing at Seggons video and calling him a dangerous idiot not long for this world who should take the bus in future. I didn't post a video on the internet of me riding off the road three times in succession on gentle right hand bends and then incorrectly diagnosing why, either.

As it happens, total humiliation worked quite well for me though - I humilated myself by crashing two different bikes on the same day through gross incompetence.

http://www.cix.co.uk/~kwh/page15.htm

I was perhaps old enough and wise enough to realise that actually, the problem was that I didn't have a single clue what I was doing. I went on a rabid quest for knowledge, for training, for literature and skills. It was a single, scant month later I think when the combined input of better and more experienced riders than myself, my reading and extensive practice definitely saved my life; I made another potentially fatal mistake and then rescued the situation by not making another, by countersteering aggressively and looking where I wanted to go, and by not having a high speed collision with a forest of metal posts as a result.

http://www.cix.co.uk/~kwh/page16.htm


Had I not had that epiphany of realising that I was so basically useless that I was a danger to myself and others, I would not have made the (huge and yet not hard) changes in my approach to the mental exercise and the mechanics of riding that in one month meant that while I was not in any way the finished article, my riding had improved enough that I did not do exactly what I had done 4 weeks earlier at the Gooseneck at Cadwell Park (where I'd bottled out, and stood the bike up having given up on getting round a corner I would have easily got round if I'd known how, then ridden straight off the track and ended up in a heap wrapped round the tyre wall...).

I also didn't like your assumption that nothing was said to Seggons after this incident. It was. He was made fully aware of just how fatal it could have been.

As long as he thinks it was also funny, or 'just one of those things', or 'was caused by {something other than his lack of key skills that he will not pick up by osmosis}, that won't help. And the photos do not show an intensive debrief, tehy show pointing and laughing. Seggons attitude doesn't seem to be that of a man who now understands what he actually did wrong and what he has to do to fix it and ensure he never makes the same series of mistakes again, either.

There are many people on here, my other half being one of them, who are strong advocates of further training, be it Bike Safe, IAM or Rospa. But who are we to order anyone to do these schemes? We can only advocate them.

Where are the mentors? Where are the experienced and advanced riders on this forum offering their wisdom? (Not people telling him that 'He did the best thing', people with a clue!). Where are the people who know Seggons, who he might actually listen to, telling him to get trained, putting him in touch with trusted advanced trainers in his local area, suggesting books he should buy and read, doing what I did above with oine of his videos and critiquing his technique constructively?

And finally, this isn't personal, it is only about Seggons because he posted a video demonstrating his imminent mortality on the internet. I see idiots regularly, I see incompetence regularly, I rarely have an opportunity to do anything about it. If I saw somebody looking for a gas leak with a lighted match, I'd say something, though, and I saw Seggons video, saw he was not long for this world and decided that if somebody gave him a clue, he'd probably still be here to enjoy riding this time next year, so I could save a life at minimal effort.

Shows how well that worked out. I should have laughed callously when I first saw the video and moved on, foprgetting about it months ago, shouldn't I...

[Lissa]

kwh..................just because people don't post 'advice' to Seggons on the forum, doesn't mean they don't either say it to his face, or via pm. Why can you not seem to get that point?

As for off-siding, there are several people on here who do it, Pete and I included. There have been several threads on the subject, but no-one as far as I know has EVER told ANYONE that they SHOULD be doing it.

[Messie]

KWH - please return to your outpost of a warped psyche and leave our little haven of relative peace and harmony.

Thank you

Originally Posted by Lissa

kwh..................just because people don't post 'advice' to Seggons on the forum, doesn't mean they don't either say it to his face, or via pm. Why can you not seem to get that point? .

Really? Do you know that, or are you just hoping? If people are giving Seggons bad advice on the forums, but good advice face to face or via PM, why has nothing apparently changed in Seggon's riding or his attitude?

As for off-siding, there are several people on here who do it, Pete and I included. There have been several threads on the subject, but no-one as far as I know has EVER told ANYONE that they SHOULD be doing it.

OK, let's look at offsiding. I presume you come from an advanced riding background if you are using this technique. The last time I heard, Offsiding had been dropped from the official IAM syllabus on the grounds that the risks outweighed the benefits. I'm not sure whether that is true, and I know that a lot of individual advanced riders, observers and instructors don't agree, but I do know (or have been told) that before they removed it from their official syllabus, the IAM lost two experienced and well respected Chief Observers from two different IAM groups to fatal accidents while offsiding, which probably had something to do with it.

I also understand that as of a year or two ago, every single police advanced training school bar one had dropped elective offsiding as a technique taught to Class 1 trainees, again because the risk-reward ratio wasn't right. The one school that does still advocate elective offsiding is very clear that the only time you should do it is when you know for certain (due to local knowledge most likely) that it is safe, that you will (not might) gain a significant advantage in view by doing it, and that you are at zero risk of being trapped on the wrong side of the road by same-direction traffic. Apparently Class 1 coppers were occasionally dying when offsiding went wrong, and the advantage of a few miles an hour and a slightly extended view was judged not worth the significantly heightened risk, and the fact that it freaks out other road users so much.

So anyway, all that should tell you (as I'm sure you already know) that offsiding can kill even very, very good riders if they get it slightly wrong, and that before you consider using the technique, you had better understand exactly what you are doing, why you are doing it, when and why you shouldn't and how to abort and get back on your own side of the road in a real hurry if you suddenly find a Ferrari or a Fireblade doing 120mph coming head on towards you on its own side of the road. Remembering that you not only have to get out of its way, but do so before the driver/rider of the Ferrari/Fireblade tries to get out of your way and utter carnage results.

Alright, so there are people here who use Offsiding. Cool. How do you think Seggons got the idea that it was something he should be doing, given that he doesn't have a handle on road positioning full stop, as a quick glance at any of his videos or five minutes behind him would tell you? Has somebody told him to do it? You say no. Has he seen you do it and thought "Oh, that's cool! Riding on the wrong side of the road round corners is a good idea! I'll try that!"? Well, I doubt it, but let us say that he did decide to try it all on his own. He talked about trying it, I saw a post in his history where he talked about it. Why did none of the people with an advanced background tell him that if he didn't know exactly 110% what he was doing, either with positioning or with countersteering, it would be an incredibly stupid thing to try and that he should sort himself out a lot of training before he should even think about it? If they did, he ignored them, because then I read a hint that perhaps he tried it on the Scottish trip and had yet another near death experience. I suspect that nobody did warn him off, either on the forum or by PM. Has anybody since?

It all seems more than unsatisfactory. Either Seggons ignores everything anybody tells him in his determination to kill himself, or nobody is telling him what he needs to hear/read. My assumption is the latter, obviously. Tell me I'm wrong.

To be honest, I wouldn't want to ride behind a rider who might decide to go round the wrong corner on the wrong side of the road at the wrong moment ahead of me. If I didn't care about him, I'd care about the vehicle coming the other way that might swerve into my path to avoid him. I don't know many riders who would. So what's going on?

[Lissa]

http://forums.sv650.org/showthread.p...ghlight=siding

http://forums.sv650.org/showthread.p...ghlight=siding

I think you'll see by reading these threads that anyone who uses off-siding is very careful to point out the correct way it should be done.

[fizzwheel]

Originally Posted by kwh

If they did, he ignored them, because then I read a hint that perhaps he tried it on the Scottish trip and had yet another near death experience. I suspect that nobody did warn him off

I did talk to him about this after one section. I said I dont do it and I explained my reasons why. I felt like he listened to what I had to say and also I dont recal him having a near miss either.

Originally Posted by kwh

It all seems more than unsatisfactory. Either Seggons ignores everything anybody tells him in his determination to kill himself, or nobody is telling him what he needs to hear/read. My assumption is the latter, obviously. Tell me I'm wrong.

You're wrong - there you go, job done.

Why are you wrong... well you are being very vocal about telling him what you feel he needs to hear & read - and yet you also feel that it is making no difference.

Therefore why don't you cease now and go and perhaps peruse the rest of the site and find something else to post about.