The story so far

It would be nice to start with something startling like “it all began the day my Granny exploded” as Iain Banks writes in the Crow Road but sadly I'm nowhere near as witty.
On the last day and the last run (just as all the ski accident stories go) of a 2 week mountain biking holiday I crashed my mountain bike into the hillside in Les Gets on what used to be called Les Gets II a World Cup downhill track. Crashing my bike is nothing unusual for me or any other mountain biker for that matter however this crash was a bit different.
I don’t know why I crashed at the bottom of the rollercoaster loop, since Lyndsey and I first came to Morzine in 2005 we have ridden it many times and this was our third visit to the place. I suppose the fact that I crashed at the top of the loop that first holiday and broke my thumb could be taken as an omen. However since that first incident our riding skills have come on a lot and we are on bikes number 3 since those days of innocence riding the same routes using our baby Trek hard tail bikes with rim brakes and not even appreciating that seat posts were meant to be lowered for steep runs! The two weeks this summer seemed to have lasted for such a long time, week one had been a great laugh with a great crowd of nutters in the chalet, especially James and Bronagh the downhill dudes. Week two was going to see us reunited with Jude and Rich and their two pals we hadn’t met before.
Silvia and Tony turned out to be great fun and we had full on long days and great adventures. I provided lots of entertaining and spectacular crashes and the week culminated in us knocking off the black downhill track Plenny. To get away with that on cross country bikes and open helmets should have sufficed and I could have lived to ride another day but the adrenaline was flowing and we all set off to have one more run over at Les Gets. On the way over we were all riding far too quickly, all of the signs were there but I was too caught up to notice. I thought about stopping on the second last curve to film the others on the head cam as I’d done all week and had the previous year with Jimmy Blair but I didn’t and at the bottom of the loop I was off the bike and had turned my left side into the fall as I slammed into the hard baked clay of the uphill track rising out of the bottom of the loop. Lying winded on my left side with my arm underneath I could see my gloved hand wasn’t moving yet I was moving my upper arm so I knew immediately I had broken the arm. Rich was right behind me and did a sterling job stopping the downhill traffic. I got up and with the adrenaline still flowing told him I would walk off the hill. He somehow managed to get both bikes down by himself. Clutching my left arm close to my chest I stumbled down the few hundred metres to the lift station. I fell on my arse at one point putting my right hand down to cushion the impact I watched the lower section of my left arm swing freely in a 180 degree arc no longer tethered by the humerus. Lyndsey’s came up to meet me and I got sat on a bench. She got the lift man to radio for an ambulance and everyone else got my kit off, Tony didn’t seem to think I was serious in getting him to cut me out of my rucksack straps. I was terrified that any movement of the arm would make it a compound fracture, I could feel and see the deformity and bone just below the surface of the skin. It seemed to be broken about mid shaft. The ambulance siren which we had been hearing throughout the two weeks could be heard in the distance then they arrived and out jumped a bunch of French fire/rescue folk with a multitude of vacuum splints. I explained as best I could I didn’t want a splint in case the movement punched the bone out of the skin and instead was helped into the back and lay on the trolley. Getting up from the bench and walking was an effort as the pain seemed to arrive once the adrenaline wore off. The pain just got steadily worse until the ambulance guys decided to bring the doctor to me rather than me to the doctor. His IV morphine saved the day and they drove me to his clinic. The x-ray showed a clean transverse fracture rather than the communuted mess I was expecting to see. A big u slab POP cast was applied after cutting me out of my coffee shop bike jersey.