Earlier today, Monday, we published a story about an MTB rider with cuts to his face and neck, having ridden into barbed wire stretched across a trail.
We stated the incident had occurred in recent days in Co Wicklow and that the rider was Irish.
However, it soon emerged the photos were not new and did not relate to any incident that had taken place in Ireland.
Instead, the pictures were published recently in the UK media and the rider had sustained his injuries when riding in the UK and fallen victim to a barbed wire trap across a trail there.
Stickybottle would like to apologise to all of our readers for what was a really bad lapse in reporting standards.
Earlier in the day we had reported on another, genuine, case involving an Irish rider finding barbed wire stretched across an MTB trail in Co Wicklow.
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When we saw the photos he had taken and posted on Facebook, we contacted him, got some further detail about his incident and also sought and received his permission to use his photos.
We published that story and within an hour the other set of photos emerged, on the social media account of another Irish media outlet.
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We didn’t perform the checks that we had done in the first case. Instead we rushed into reporting what we thought was a follow-up story to the first case in Wicklow.
But we now accept completely there was no follow-up case and that the second set of photos originated in the UK.
Mistakes will happen, of course. And in the 4½ years since we began stickybottle we have never published a hoax photo story as we did today.
None of this makes today’s lapse acceptable. But we feel it’s important to acknowledge publicly we got it wrong.
We were rightly caught out by a lack of basic checks and will work to ensure it won’t happen again.
We are taking this opportunity to apologise in the hope that you, our readers, will accept our apology and continue to tune into the site.
Some days are better than others. Today wasn’t great, but we move on!
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