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Cyclist badly injured from riding into barbed wire trap on trail

Authorities are on the lookout for whoever set it up

Cyclists in Wales are being told to watch out for barbed wire that may be hanging across trails. On Wednesday, there were some horrific images of injuries that a man suffered on his bike when he rode into the trap. He sustained over a dozen lacerations across his throat following the incident in Gelli, Wales.

The abhorrent practice of stringing barbed wire across trails to injure mountain bikers or dirt bikers is not a new thing. In 2018, a mountain biker in Toronto’s Don Valley encountered a trap that appeared to have been set up to injure cyclists. At the time, a local shop in the city’s east end, posted a photo of one of its team riders with deep wounds on his arms. The wounds came from barbed wire and razor blades that the rider had encountered on a descent to one of the main trails.

Mountain biker injured by trail sabotage in Toronto’s Don Valley

On Vancouver Island in 2013, a mountain biker had a scare, having suffered a scrape across his neck when he collided with a thick wire stretched across a trail near Durrance Lake, BC. Derek Kidd was riding with a friend when he saw the wire and was able to brake hard before it did any serious damage while warning the friend of the danger.

BC mountain biker escapes serious wire injury

The use of barbed wire across trails thankfully does seem to be rare. Stelianos Psaroudakis told CBC reporters in 2017 that he could see something out of the corner of his eye, but by the time he realized what it was, it was too late to stop. The barbed wire “just hit me like a ton of bricks,” he said, resulting in a wound to his throat that extended from one side of his neck to the other. In places, reports say, the wire gouged into his flesh a centimetre deep, in a frightening incident at West Bragg Creek Provincial Recreation Area. In that instance, it turns out that Psaroudakis fabricated the story, and eventually fled to Germany to avoid charges.

However, as you can see below, Wednesday’s event seems to be the real deal, and hopefully authorities can track down the person that laid such a potentially deadly trap.