![\"benny-1x1-owen-springs\"](\"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/benny-1x1-owen-springs.jpg\" "\\"benny-1x1-owen-springs\\"")
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Six hours\u00a0is a long time. Footy matches are played and won in six hours. Think of\u00a0 a\u00a0six hour enduro, how do you feel at the end? Is it a long time to be in the saddle?? It takes\u00a0six hours to drive from Hobart to Queenstown and back. Six hours is one hour and twenty eight minutes short of your entire working day. Six hours can feel like forever.<\/p>\n
Now imagine that you’ve crashed your bike and in the fall you are\u00a0impailed\u00a0on a 45cm long wooden stake. It enters your body between the top of your right leg and the bottom of your buttock,\u00a0passing though your bowel and groin before exiting through your loins on\u00a0the front left hand side of your body.\u00a0This would hurt.\u00a0Pain like nothing\u00a0we could ever imagine.\u00a0 Think in terms of those six hours now, could you take six hours with a stick through your most sensitive of parts? I couldn’t, but Matt Yates did.<\/p>\n
Twenty two kilometers into the second days stage of the ‘Anaconda MTB Enduro’, Matt attempted to ride up a short, rocky pinch when he lost his balance, lifted the front wheel and fell backwards onto a Mulga Bush. Mulga is notorious amoungst four wheel drivers, it is a particularly hard wood with sharp pointed branches that can punture even the hardiest of offroad tires. Matt landed on one of these Mulga ‘spikes’ from a height of one meter, his full one hundred and five kilogram weight driving down on the bush. It lodged in his body exactly as I described above. I was standing less than two meters away and heard his skin ‘pop’ as the wood pierced his skin.\u00a0 Matt screamed and I did too. Fuck. It was the worst thing I have ever seen out on my bike.<\/p>\n
For a second Matt thought he had been knackered by his seat, but I could see the stake through his body and told him not to move. I was seriously scared. This was serious. I had to do something. I pulled out my first aid kit and sat next to him. Fuck!? What do I do? Another rider (Nina) stopped to see if we were ok. I told her no. Definately not ok. She took a quick look at Matt’s injury and soon was as white and sweaty\u00a0as both Matt and I. The stake had ‘plugged’ the wound and none too much blood was kicking about.\u00a0Nothing in the first aid kit was going to help, we needed professionals. I called the Race Organiser (Rapid Ascent), described the injury, where we were and asked that a helicopter come extract Matt NOW.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Matt had crashed on a remote section of singletrack twenty kilometers from Alice Springs. The nearest four wheel drive access track was four kilometers (?)\u00a0away. Now you would think that a guy with a stick stuck diagonally through him would warrant immediate attention, for fucks sake there are major arteries down there! But, nope, the Rapid Ascent guys sent us a Check Point Marshall first.. That took fifty minutes. The Marshall showed up, didn’t really look at Matt’s injury (he had to look three times before he would believe that the stick was through Matt and not just his knicks),\u00a0before calling a First Aid Officer to the scene. I was getting pissed off, a First Aid Officer? Fuck no. We NEED a helicopter with Paramedics. I asked the Marshall to make the call, he wouldn’t do it stating that the First Aid Officer would handle it.\u00a0A First Aid Officer arrived on the scene\u00a0two hours after the accident first happened. She had a stretcher with her and a small bag of tricks, none of which were suitable\u00a0for fixing a problem this big. I now asked her to call for a helicopter. She at least called the Ambo’s\u00a0asking for\u00a0assistance and the ‘possibility’ of helicopter extraction,\u00a0but as\u00a0she did not press home the severity of the situation the Ambo’s sent a terrestrial crew out in a four wheel drive. Fuck.<\/p>\n
By this stage Matt was complaining that he couldn’t feel his left leg, his testicles and of sharp pain that he rated 8\/10. I was starting to freak, I work as a Park Ranger and we train for these sort of circumstances, I knew that we should be putting him in a helicopter as time is of the essence and\u00a0NOT fucking about trying to put a one hundred and five kilogram man on a stretcher and attempt to carry him four kilometers (?)\u00a0over rough and tight singletrack. But no-one listened.<\/p>\n
Ok, so we’re going to carry him out? I asked the Marshall to call for more people to be sent up and help with extraction as with only four people we could only carry Matt five to ten meters at a time before we had to set him down and rest. The Marshall said ‘No, the Ambo’s are coming and they’ll take care of it’. Ok, how ’bout we call the Ambo’s and make sure they have sent two big blokes and not two little women? Nope. The Marshall didn’t make the call.\u00a0 I was beside myself\u00a0with anger but I\u00a0tried to remain calm externally so not as to freak Matt out.<\/p>\n
The Ambo’s arrived on the scene at the four hour mark. One big guy and one tiny little chick. They pumped Matt full of morphine and then helped us carry Matt then remaining distance back to the vehicles. It was unbelievably hard. We had to go slow so that the stake didn’t saw at Matt’s insides and to ensure we didn’t drop him or bump the stake. It took another hour and a half to get Matt to the ambulance (which had a flat tire from a mulga spike recieved in the rough traverse in). Once there, the Ambo’s debated how the fuck they would drive Matt to hospital in the four wheel drive as the motion of the vehicle would cause the stake to move and possibly cause more damage. The male Ambo said he wished he had a helicopter… Unbelievably they drove Matt to hospital (a half hour drive) over some of the worst four wheel drive tracks you have ever seen. The pain he went through must have been HUGE!<\/p>\n
Matt went straight into surgery. The doctors operated for five hours to remove the stake. It had missed his major artery by two millimeters, had it of been hit, Matt would have been dead in minutes. They pain in Matt’s left leg was caused by blood flow being blocked by the stake. Matt was within minutes of losing his leg.<\/p>\n
I am totally gobsmaked at how this event was handled by Rapid Ascent, given I told\u00a0race organisers about the serverity of the indicent at 10:20am, that we didn’t have Ambulance Officers on the scene until 2:30pm (it may have been later).<\/p>\n
I can’t make it any clearer, Matt’s life was at stake. He could have died.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Six hours\u00a0is a long time. Footy matches are played and won in six hours. Think of\u00a0 a\u00a0six hour enduro, how do you feel at the end? Is it a long time to be in the saddle?? It takes\u00a0six hours to drive from Hobart to Queenstown and back. Six hours is one hour and twenty eight … Continue reading “Six Hours.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1383"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1386,"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383\/revisions\/1386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}