A manufacturing fault caused a carbon fork to snap and a rider to lose his life.
A coroner’s inquest in Australia has found a 49-year-old cyclist crashed and died from his injuries because of a fault in his front fork dating back to the manufacturing process.
The coroner said the death of deceased cyclist, Canberra man Richard Stanton, was in no way linked to how he maintained his bike or an earlier minor crash he had been involved in.
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Instead, Coroner Lisbeth Campbell concluded his Trek 2000 had a fault from the time of manufacture nearly 10 years earlier. And it had resulted in the carbon forks failing on a fatigue fracture in the aluminium steering tube.
She found the steering tube had “unexpectedly and catastrophically failed" in January 2015 while he was riding up a hill on a coffee spin just after setting off having stopped at a cafe.
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Mr Stanton suffered injuries to his head, face and neck and did from those injuries in a Canberra hospital three days later.
The coroner’s court concluded that neither Mr Stanton nor those who serviced his bikes two months before the fatal crash could have detected the “inclusion flaw” present since the manufacturing process and which caused his fork to fail.
Dr Campbell suggested the Australian authorities examine the possibility of setting time limits for the use of bikes and components, saying it was done in the aeronautic industry which used many of the same materials as modern racing bikes.
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However, representatives of the bicycle industry in Australia have pointed out that the use of aircraft was closely monitored and recorded, meaning their precisely mileage and time in the air was always up to date and available.
This was not the case with bicycles and introducing such recording for bike use would be impossible, Bicycle Industries Australia said.
Sonia Stanton said her husband of 20 years looked after and serviced his bike like many people tend to their car.
And she told the inquest he always wore a helmet and would not ride at certain times during the day because he felt it was dangerous due to traffic.
"He was very down to earth and not flashy. Some people enjoy getting the newest gadget or the newest car, whereas he wasn't like that,” she said.
“I think he felt a degree of satisfaction that they might have the latest and greatest but he could still overtake them going up a hill."
She said her husband’s death raised concerns about the practice of older riders handing down bikes to others to ride. But she questioned where putting a safe limit for bike use was workable.
"A bike doesn't have a speedometer, so the age of a bike can mean so many different things,” she said.
“If someone parks a bike in a garage and rides it twice a year for the first five years, then clearly at the end of the first five years it hasn't got anything nearly like the metal fatigue of a bike someone rides 6,000 kilometres a year.
“So it is difficult but I still am hopeful that difficulty can be gotten around in some way."
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