goose70

You've been watching too many legal eagle TV shows. Your client won't thank you for being an aggressive SOB when doing so lands them deeper in hot water, and people will stop retaining you. Most of the time, the job of a competent defense attorney is to counsel your client on when not to fight, and to negotiate the best deal you can for your client rather than put them before a judge and/or jury.

In this case, the video evidence alone strongly suggests that the woman came to that location because of the bike race, prepared to be an active part of that race event by creating a sign for it, understood that the race was approaching, yet stepped toward the edge of the race while turning her back to the riders and reaching towards the road to hold up a sign. The fact that others may have done it in the past is of no matter. I'm not very familiar with French law, but it's likely that their code contains negligence provisions that, like U.S. and UK law, rely on a standard of reasonableness under the circumstances. Her actions were clearly unreasonable to the point of recklessness.

If she has competent defense counsel, that counsel will have already advised her to express regret to French officials and Tour/team officials, indicate that she understands why what she did was dangerous and negligent, and otherwise keep a low profile out of the public spotlight while s/he negotiates the best deal that can be had. Sounds like that's how things are progressing.

CliffordK

Was there a second cameraman there to take the photo of the woman + bikes?

It likely was her intent to get the coming bicycles in the photo, but had poorly planned the action.

Next time she should learn to take a bunch of photos before the cyclists arrive, then take a photo with the cyclists, and photo shop the two together. Much safer that way.

Unfortunately, copycats may not understand the art of photography.

vane171

Wider problem here is that people have little respect when it comes to bikes. Bicycling is essentially viewed as a harmless pursuit, where majority of bike riders are your average folks out there who just dawdle about at little more than pedestrian speeds.

That's why you see 50+ yrs olds sitting in lawn chairs right next to paved surface waiting for peloton to show up. They wouldn't do that in a car rally race (never mind people do underestimate those too but not as badly as when it comes to bike races).

Everybody knows that 50 kph in town is so slow when you go in a car and they don't think much of it when they hear that those pros ride that 'fast' (or that slow really) as an average speed when in a pack. And we all know you are like a bullet when going 50 kph which is some 30 mph and braking is not too effective at that speed compared to four wheeled vehicles.

Russ Roth

I was wondering in all of it if the bike sponsors would go after her to recoup costs. There were a lot of bikes being swapped after the accident from damage. How many 1000.00 wheels were damaged or 5,000.00 frames, I've wondered what the actual ticket price of the crash was, with so many riders involved riding what are often 8 to 10,000+ dollar bikes, the costs of even a little damage to some of them could bankrupt a person.