Ups & Downs
Ups & downs
UP: To Canadian skating superstar Elvis Stojko, for taking to asphalt instead of ice. An off-road rider since age 7, the three-time world figure skating champion recently attended Michel Mercier’s FAST roadracing school (above). By day’s end, he’d proved to be one of the fastest students, and had also found some similarities to skating.
“I’m always pushing my limits skating, and that’s what I’m doing here,” Stojko told The Toronto Star. “The only difference is that there’s 450 pounds of motorcycle between me and the ground rather than a thin steel blade.”
DOWN: To novelist Faye Kellerman, for her insensitive, inaccurate and generally irresponsible portrayal of motorcyclists. In her book, Prayers for the Dead, a heart surgeon, incensed that helmet use is cutting into his supply of transplant organs, tries to convince bikers to go lidless. To prove the doc’s supposed bike cred, Kellerman has him stating that a Harley’s “cam-chain tensioner isn’t calibrated to exact zero” and that “the front hydraulic fork isn’t welded properly to the brake caliper.”
UP: To California motorcyclists, for riding safe. California Highway Patrol statistics show a 70 percent reduction in the number of motorcycle-related casualties in the last decade, with 231 deaths and 7860 injuries in 1996 compared to 851 deaths and 28,097 injuries in 1986.
“Statistics are sometimes hard to interpret,” said CHP Commissioner Dwight Helmick, “but these numbers tell us the plain and simple fact that California motorcycle riding is the safest it has ever been in the modern era.”
Helmick gives much of the credit to the California Motorcyclist Safety Program, which has trained more than 100,000 new riders since 1987.
