"I had cyclists telling me I was a disgrace for saying my helmet saved my
life": Dan Walker recalls helmet backlash after being knocked off bike by
driver

The presenter revealed he did not ask the police to pursue charges against
the driver responsible as: "We all make mistakes, don't we?"...

by DAN ALEXANDER

It is one year on from the collision caused by a driver that knocked Dan
Walker off his bike and left him unconscious for 25 minutes, hospitalised
with facial injuries and "glad to be alive".

Unbeknown to the TV and radio presenter, his subsequent social media post
thanking the helmet he was wearing that "saved my life" and advising others
"if you're on a bike — get one on your head" would cause one of the great
episodes in the well-trodden helmet safety debate path.

Now, 12 months on and looking back at the collision and aftermath, Walker
explained to The Times (link is external) newspaper how he did not ask the
police to pursue charges against the driver as "we all make mistakes, don't
we?"

"Within 24 hours I'd had drivers tell me that if it had been them, they'd
have finished the job," Walker recalled.

"I had cyclists telling me I was a disgrace for saying that my helmet saved
my life. 'You're the reason people wear helmets'. There's a lobby,
apparently, that says if you wear a helmet drivers think you're safer than
you are, therefore they hit you.

"So I got people angry on all sides and I thought, 'I don't want to enter
this. I'm very happy that I'm still around'. There's a part of me that
genuinely thought that was it."

Walker went on to explain how the collision felt like an out-of-body
experience, he was knocked unconscious for 25 minutes by the impact, and
passed out again once he had come round, waking up in the back of the
ambulance that attended the scene at a Sheffield roundabout.

"In my mind I was cycling down a French boulevard, a tree-lined boulevard,
which I think I'd been to before but not on a bike. Then all of a sudden I
was watching myself on the floor, watching a screen, and then on that
screen I saw these two heads appear. And then I jumped back into myself and
I was on the floor and those two faces were the ambulance workers. I don't
know. I don't know..."

Walker took up cycling in 2022 as "an eco thing" due to working in London
where "taxis are a nightmare".

"I started to get around on the bike," he explained at the time. "I can go
from Downing Street to St Pancras in about 15 minutes, and it's about 30
minutes in a taxi so although I feel like a bit of a geek sometimes, I'm
very much enjoying it."

The BBC's reporting of the incident which left him hospitalised was
criticised by many, BBC South East claiming Walker had suffered his
injuries after "colliding with a car while cycling" despite him saying he
had been "hit by a car [driver]".

In the aftermath Walker too was blamed for not using an underpass cycle
lane and instead riding, perfectly legally, on the road. However, local
cyclists defended the Classic FM presenter's choice to avoid using the
subway, which was described by one as a "dank tunnel" and "filled with
broken glass".

But it was Walker's line, "don't be a helmet, wear a helmet" that caused
the most controversy as the former BBC Breakfast host seemingly innocently
advised his large social media following to wear a helmet when cycling. A
throwaway comment concerning the usefulness of his helmet?

The choice of focus on the personal protective equipment, rather than the
main driving-related cause of the collision, irked some, while others took
issue with the claim it had "saved his life".

Numerous days of social media debating and an at-length feature on why the
claim was controversial by this website followed, Walker now rather wisely
concluding he was left thinking: "I don't want to enter this"...

<https://road.cc/content/news/dan-walker-recalls-helmet-backlash-after-driver-hit-him-306887>

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Spike