Originally Posted by livedarklions

The only word in that I'd disagree with is "sometimes". When you crash at speed, how you land is really a coin flip, and you're the coin. My fastest wipe out was at the bottom of a San Francisco hill where I didn't see that a manhole had not been raised to the grade of the road. I wasn't recording my speed (it was 1992, electronics were expensive) , but I had to be going 35-40 mph. My front wheel went into the hole, and I flew over the handlebars. Somehow, I managed to do this in front of a house that happened to have a front yard (not a lot of those on hills in SF), and I actually landed on grass. Road rash and a sprained hand, but nothing serious, think it would have been a lot worse if I'd landed on the road or a sidewalk.