It feels wrong that cycling is more likely to result in your premature death than strapping on a kite and stepping off a cliff

I have a sort of a resolution for 2025. It’s simply to do more of my riding outside, in the actual outdoors, in three dimensions. I’ve grown very comfortable with Zwift (and similar online platforms), and I like the convenience. But more than anything else, riding outdoors has come to make me a bit nervous. Even a little scared. Cycling feels like a dangerous way to spend your time.

Michael Hutchinson

Multiple national champion on the bike and award-winning author Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week

I was thinking about this over Christmas because, at a party, I met someone whose hobby is hang gliding. “Sounds like fun,” I said. Then I cut to what is clearly the question anyone would want to know the answer to: “How many of you die doing that every year?”

“In the UK? On average maybe three or four. Probably fewer, to be honest,” he said.

Now I appreciate there are more cyclists than hang gliders, and the amount of time that you might spend doing them isn’t the same. Clearly no one commutes by hang glider. But still, taken in the round, when it comes to hobbies cycling is more likely to result in your premature death than strapping on a kite and stepping off a cliff. This feels wrong.

If you die hang gliding you can at least console yourself in the afterlife that you died striving to soar like a bird and to conquer mankind’s natural fear of gravity and high-speed impacts. In short, you’d die having an adventure. If I die cycling, chances are it will be because someone was driving home from Morrisons and fiddling with the radio attempting to find Ken Bruce doing PopMaster. Next thing you know I’ll be sitting in hell grumpily muttering, “Greatest Hits Radio, you moron.”

The thing is that cycling should be as safe as safe can be. The dangers are almost always of someone else’s making. You can’t complain if the terror is your own work – I once rode down a Welsh hill at 73mph in an attempt to break a time trial record and that was alarming, but it was an adventure. But most of the terror we deal with isn’t like that.

The random dangers of a fundamentally safe activity are much as if household appliances randomly exploded. “What happened to Dave? I hear he’s in the hospital?” “Ah, yes, unfortunate really, but his toaster went off. Destroyed his whole house. He’s lucky to be alive, but you know, making toast without a helmet or hi-viz… he was sort of asking for it.”

This would be a world where the manufacturer of the toaster could avoid prosecution for blowing someone’s head clean off by sitting through a 90-minute online course about the dangers of selling highly explosive household devices. If they made, say, 12 exploding toasters in a three-year period, they’d lose their toastermaking licence for 12 months unless they could show undue hardship.

I think people would object to this sort of thing. There is a doom-spiral about road safety – people expect cyclists to get run down because cyclists already get run down so no one tries too hard to stop it happening because it’s “inevitable”. Other people getting hurt is just the price of having to check your messages while driving at 50% over the speed limit. Even the police don’t seem too bothered about it – it’s right down there with bike theft.

But I’m going to try to put this out of my mind a bit more effectively in 2025. After all, I might get scared on a fairly regular basis, but I haven’t actually died all that often, and nothing quite compares to being out in the three-dimensional world.