Injury rumors

I have not been able to substantiate any of this, but I'll pass on the rumors.

1fatality linked to the race. According to what I have heard a gentleman fell asleep while riding and hit a guardrail. He was allegedly not wearing a helmet when the accident occurred. There was rumored to be a skid mark signifying that he might have come to just prior to the collision

50 cases of heat related withdrawals. Very possible to believe this. The south was extremely hot. Mark and I came close to having a problem down there until we pulled over and poured ice water over our heads and drank a lot of fluids

At least 10 accidents that involved riders down for various reasons with at least 2 being attributed to riders hitting deer. I even heard a story about a rider who came across a Ultra in a ditch off of the 212 in Montana. This was early morning. When he went down to inspect what happened he found a guy in a field with injuries. He thinks the guy had been there for about 4-6 hours before he came across him. It was a cold night but the rider was transported to a hospital and was reported to be ok. 1 rider was rear ended while riding at 65 by a car going 85. He sustained a broken leg and a lot of road rash. I can only guess that he hit the brakes after missing a turn and the car behind him was not paying attention, but that is only a guess. Easy to do though, we often had our eyes on the directions and road signs and not paying a lot of attention to the traffic around us

This is all rumor and conjecture at the moment. I am not sure what the actual tally is or what really happened to people. I just have third party info. As of now it is difficult to get any real info especially because I am in Seattle at the present time.

Mark and I had a couple close calls. In the south I was almost hit by a car that ended up in a ditch. Once or twice we hit the brakes because of a missed turn causing traffic behind us to so the same thing (we were very careful about this but sometimes traffic behind was not). A couple of times cars would turn out of driveways in front of us on some of the deserted back roads. There was evasive action required to miss a armadillo or some such animal In the ozarks. We did not see too much wildlife in the road. A few deer, a dog or two, one abandoned kitten, a chipmunk(rip), and a couple of close birds, but for the most part we were lucky.

I hope all that were injured are healing and able to ride again soon. My deepest condolences to the family of the downed rider.


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