Taking a step back

This has been a tough early season for bike racers around me. I'm sure most of my readers (both of them!) know what I'm referring to, and if not I won't go into details. But having finally crashed myself (cyclocross doesn't count!), and then hearing about accidents from merely ouchy to truly tragic recently, I've given a bit of thought to what the hell I'm doing out there risking life and limb racing my bicycle.
__One observation I've made is that the perceived 'safety' of a type of race has been in somewhat reverse proportion to the actual incidents. For example, most would consider time trials to be the safest, yet one of the worst crashes recently occurred during a time trial. As much as I tease the trackies, I know that track racing is pretty safe, and yet some serious carnage has occurred on the track recently as well. Road racing ranks about in the middle, yet by far the worst incident happened on the road very recently. Criterium racing, on the other hand, undoubtedly perceived as the most dangerous, has seemed to have had the least serious carnage of late, with me suffering some minor road rash and a bruised ego, and my teammate a somewhat more serious but not permanently debilitating injury.
__What lesson is to be learned from this? For me, I guess it's always to be vigilant. Not that extra vigilance it would necessarily have prevented any of these incidents, but no matter the venue, things can happen. People tend to be more careful in races that are known to be dangerous, such as criteriums. Case in point, at the last Summit crit the men's race overtook the women's race at the worst possible time and place: on the last half of the last lap in a tight S curve, jockeying for position in the final sprint. You could literally cut the tension in the field with a knife, as everyone knew that this was a set-up for carnage. Yet everyone was very careful and nothing ended up happening, and I'm sure some gave up an opportunity to win in exchange for safety. But even in races where incidents are fewer, things can happen. Being somewhat new to racing, this hasn't really been drilled into my head through personal experience yet (fortunately!), but I'll certainly be watching out more in the future, and looking for more opportunities to learn from those more experienced than I am. Winning a race is so much less important than being safe!
__So keep the rubber side down, be safe, and take 'er easy. My thoughts go out to those who have been injured or killed in bike races recently, and those who have been affected, be it friends, family or witnesses.