Toronto Police guide Brazilian cycling team off the Don Valley Parkway

There’s taking a wrong turn when you’re out for a ride, and then there’s taking the sort of wrong turn that finds you pedaling along one of Canada’s busiest expressways, in the nation’s largest city.

On Sunday morning, that’s the exact situation in which the Brazilian national cycling team found themselves.

In full uniform, the Brazilian team, in town for the Pan Am Games, had set out for a training ride near the Pan Am Athletes Village in the east end of Toronto. Riding along Eastern Avenue, not far from the Don Valley Parkway — a six-lane, 15 km expressway with a speed limit of 90 kph, running from north to south through the city — they saw a ramp up ahead and took it.

But as they soon realized, that ramp directed them on to the Don Valley Parkway itself. At around 10 a.m., the CBC reported, Toronto Police received calls about a group of people biking on the expressway, something cyclists are legally prohibited from doing in the city. Arriving at the scene, police found them riding northbound along the shoulder, not in the HOV lane, and the team was escorted safely off at the expressway’s Don Mills Road exit — several kilometres from where they started.

The team was given information about safer routes for training rides, and no charges will be laid against them, police said. All nine riders, they added, were co-operative and apologetic.

“The athletes didn’t know about this prohibition and won’t do it anymore,” the team officially responded.