The pothole, the cyclists and the lawyer

Hey, this is great. The Star is totally taking this guy to task for being a whiny self-centred moron. Seriously - take your screw-ups like an adult (not like a man, b/c I seriously doubt the Flygurls would appreciate the putdown). Anyway, ordinarily I wouldn't post the entire article, but the star will block access in 14 days and I want to make sure that this is still around. And, if any of my many lawyer acquaintances actually know this putz, tell him to learn how to bike rather than suing a bunch of people doing yeoman's work protecting a little-known but beautiful part of the countryside.
Seriously. This makes me angry (and most of you are fully aware of how passive-aggressive I am, so this is unusual). Take some responsibility for your actions. You choose to bike on a single track trail. You fall. That happens. It's supposed to happen. Otherwise there would be no fear and no challenge and no reward for actually pushing yourself. If you don't want that to happen, don't leave the spin class. Pick up bocce. How is this anyone's fault but his? Frankly, I'm amazed that he didn't opt to sue his bike manufacturer for not outfitting his ride with a pothole detector and avoidance system. Argh.

Thank you Slinger for breathing some common sense into this:
The Kolapore Uplands, 5,000 hectares of the Niagara Escarpment a little south and west of the bottom end of Georgian Bay, is the largest and roughest patch of semi-wilderness left in southern Ontario. Steep and rugged, what isn't cliff face or exposed rock is hardwood forest regrown since being clear-cut a century ago. It is a dreamscape for the craziest risk-takers, and since the 1970s, the University of Toronto Outing Club and the Kolapore Uplands Wilderness Ski Trails Committee have cut 60 kilometres of trails through it that are earnestly posted 'Challenging Ski Trails - Not For Novice Skiers.' They are volunteer organizations; the trails are maintained by volunteers; anybody can use them for free. Costs are covered by donations, which totalled $2,600 this year, and the sale of a trail map without which it is easy to blunder into even greater peril.
Since the volunteers' interest is solely skiing, in seasons when there is no snow the trails are left to fend for themselves. But in the 1990s the mountain bike appeared, and with it the mountain bikers who discovered in Kolapore the hellishly beautiful terrain that makes their testosterone-charged adrenalin bubble and boil. The best (that is, the worst) of the trails earn the highest mountain-biking accolade: radical. Presumably 'totally radical'' would be prying open elevator doors at the CN Tower and biking down the empty shaft. It's unlikely that the lack of maintenance for cycling is considered a drawback.

Then along came James Leone, 31, a Torontonian who, last Aug. 1, was on a trail that bikers grade as "easiest" when, according to documents filed in court, "suddenly and without warning his bicycle came to an abrupt stop" and he was thrown forward, "striking the ground with sudden and violent force." Plunging into a "hole in the ground, the depth, size and location of which constituted an unusual danger" might sound like something that's all in a day's (or five minutes') adventure for a mountain biker, except for one thing: Leone is a lawyer.
As one of the country's foremost legal experts explained to me, the first thing first-year law students learn the first day of civil procedure is, when you sue, "sue everything in sight." Leone is suing the outing club, the ski trails committee, the regional trails network, the local municipality and the province (which owns the land where he encountered the alleged hole) — everything but the sky above and the Earth itself. He wants $1,150,000 in damages for expenses and lost income as a result of a fractured vertebra he says he suffered, while his co-plaintiff — his wife, Ashley, who wasn't biking — "sustained a loss of guidance, care and companionship" she might reasonably have expected if he hadn't run into said hole.
Leone's stated position is that, whether they like it or not, the volunteer organizations and the province, by permitting the trails to exist on its land, are responsible for creating "a situation of danger from which the plaintiff, despite all reasonable efforts and precautions was unable to extricate himself," and that they "failed to take reasonable care to protect the plaintiff from the unusual danger, of which they knew or ought to have known." Leone and his lawyer declined several requests for an interview, so we don't know the answers to three questions I left on his voice mail. Was he alone? Given the seriousness of his injuries, how did he make his way from the site of the wreck? And how much mountain-biking experience did he have, or was this his first time?
These lead to other questions. If a hole in the ground was such a surprise, would he have been better off mountain biking on a sidewalk in Toronto (although holes abound in them)? If the hole was big enough to crack up in, how did he fail to see it if he was "exercising reasonable care for his own safety" as his statement of claim attests?
And how come nobody else crashed into such a big hole, or did they and just figured that's the way it goes?

Certainly skiers have gotten hurt on the trails, some of them local experts, some severely — but nobody has ever sued before. Mountain biking ain't kiddie car. By suing, James Leone might make it so that nobody can do either. Even if he loses, chances are that the limited insurance the volunteer organizations carry will become so expensive they can't afford it, or it won't be available at all. This would force them to stop the work they've done for years. The trails would disappear. It is a curious thing, and it seems to be verging on epidemic — people refusing to accept responsibility for their own actions. If something bad happens to you, even if it happened because you did something beyond your abilities or plain foolish, blame somebody else. Nothing is your fault.