The amateur cyclist being schooled in descending by an instructor crashed and is now paralysed and in a wheelchair for life.
A cyclist left paralysed after crashing while under instruction during an MTB ride is set for a compensation award of several million pounds after his instructor was found most responsible for the incident.
Asif Ahmed (47) paid £79 for a beginners’ MTB course in the UK 4½ years ago. He was riding in a group being instructed by Leon MacLean when he crashed going down a steep hill.
His front wheel suddenly became jammed, possibly in a glump of tough grass, and he was thrown over the handlebars, hitting the top of his head off the ground in an impact that paralysed him.
Mr Ahmed, who works as a solicitor, will spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair after the crash in March, 2012, descending the steep Holmbury Hill in Surrey Hills.
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The injured man, of Greenwich High Road, sued Mr MacLean, Edinburgh Road, Norwich, over the incident.
And now a court has ruled the instructor was 80 per cent responsible for the crash.
The judge found Mr Ahmed 20 per cent to blame because the court believed he should have flagged his concerns about his competency to ride down the steep hill at speed.
Mr Ahmed is a qualified bio-technologist, engineer, barrister and solicitor and still works as the latter despite his injuries.
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Mr Justice Jeremy Baker accepted that Mr MacLean, a former school teacher, was not “reckless”.
But he believed the instructor was negligent in “encouraging” Mr Ahmed to ride down the hill at speed without assessing his bike handling skills first.
He believed the injured party was a “novice rider” who should have been warned not to take the most difficult descent of the hill.
Instead, he had been exposed to serious risk because he was sent down a hill beyond his capacity to remain safe on.
The court heard Mr Ahmed had been riding a bike for years but was a novice on steep and rough terrain.
The judge accepted there was nothing wrong with the instructor taking those he was teaching out of their comfort zone but he had given Mr Ahmed false confidence in his own abilities.
He had “failed to carry out his tuition with reasonable skill and care”.
However, the judge also noted that Mr MacLean was still a leading mountain biking instructor and there was “no reason to believe” he was not a competent one.
The compensation award to Mr Ahmed has not yet been assessed but is likely to be in excess of £3 million.
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