RATTLESNAKE BLUES

Ned Overend was the first official XC world champion – a title he won on home turf in Durango, Colorado, way back in 1990 – and he’s still out there shredding and dicing with danger all these years later

I’ve been in a lot of dangerous situations, with crashes and stuff like that. Most of the bad ones have actually been on a road bike. They stack up, and I do suffer residual damage from them, although I consider myself lucky that in more than 40 years of racing, things haven’t been worse.

There have been races where things have gone wrong because I’ve been underprepared. A few years back, I competed in the Schwarzwald [Black Forest] MTB marathon in Germany, and when we started climbing it began to rain. I had arm warmers on but no jacket, and got soaking wet. In the end, I had to dismount and hide under a tree. Eventually the storm passed and the sun came out, but I was extremely cold. Similar things have happened on a few other occasions, when I’ve ended up with hypothermia.

It’s the more recent incidents that come to mind as particularly dangerous, though – like one from only a few weeks ago. I was riding my mountain bike at the bike park in Phoenix, Arizona, and I sped around a corner to come face-to-face with a big rattlesnake.

It was around five inches wide and stretched right across the trail. I took the corner with enough speed that I didn’t have time to brake, so I just rolled right over him!

I remember cringing, thinking that he was about to bite me in the ankle, and braced myself. Fortunately, the fact that he was stretched right out, rather than being coiled like a spring, meant that he was unable to strike very far. Once I’d got to a safe distance I stopped and looked back, and saw he’d coiled himself up and was looking pretty pissed off with me! I snapped a photo of him as he went into the bushes, but it was certainly a close one.

That run-in really got my heart racing. Whether it was a dangerous species or not, I survived unscathed, but it shook me up, because it was a good size and rattlesnake bites can be pretty dangerous, even fatal.