It's easy to divine Larry's motivation for defending that group, which boils down to the following: what they're doing must be OK because those would-be racers are the coolest bike guys out on the road, and I want to be with the cool guys. It's like being accepted by the coolest clique in high school. Or at least tolerated by them.
I was in my mid-30s when I stopped participating in such dangerous group rides, where the judgment of the riders was clouded by, as my girlfriend semi-jokingly put it, the effects of "testosterone poisoning." A couple of years later, a motorcyclist emailed the local cycling club to point out how the behavior of some club members that he'd encountered was heedlessly dangerous and got jeering replies from some club members ("Guess he doesn't know how to handle a motorcycle if bike riders scare him," etc.).
I happened to still be on the mailing list, so, when the barrage of adolescent sneering showed no signs of letting up, I weighed in to say that I'd stopped riding with them years before for precisely the reasons that the motorcyclist had detailed. Belligerent reply from a self-appointed club ride spokesman: "Were you there? Did you see what happened? If not," etc. Sigh.
Luckily, at that point a well-known local racer joined the discussion to say that she'd also stopped riding with the group, out of fear. As she said, "I figured that when everyone is riding curb to curb on blind S-turn downhills, a driver is bound to swerve to avoid them and hit me." I then told the "Were you there?" guy that everyone admired him and that he and he alone could and should impose some rules to keep the ride safer. Since he was actually quite a rational guy, he agreed. I then separately emailed the motorcyclist, who was the only other person in the conversation who was behaving like an adult, and thanked him for reaching out and thus perhaps saving one or more people from crashing or worse.
It was tough enough getting the participants in that smallish ride to reform themselves. Larry's ride group never will, until the first fatality. If then.
An academic question: is the effective IQ of that group inversely proportional to the size of the group? Or is it equal to that of the most moronic of the participants?
Last edited by Trakhak; 07-25-21 at 11:18 AM.