By John Smith • 10 June 2021 • 13:11
Real Vikings wear helmets Credit: Rådet for Sikker Trafik
A NEW humorous video has been issued in Denmark which says ‘Real Vikings wear helmets’ and tells the story of a chief setting out to invade England without his.
Rådet for Sikker Trafik pushes the point that in medieval times you wouldn’t hear a Viking say ‘it ruins my hair’ when he needed to wear a helmet on his horse. No excuses. He would just wear it for the sake of safety.
Whether you are a Viking on a journey or a cyclist who is going into traffic, it is good to wear a helmet says Rådet for Sikker Trafik in its new campaign ‘The helmet has always been a good idea’.
“There is a great deal of humor and irony in our new campaign,” Lisbeth Sahl, the senior project manager at Rådet for Sikker Trafik told the Copenhagen Post.
“But behind it is also a message that the excuses we sometimes have for not wearing a bicycle helmet can be a bit silly when we look at how high the price can be if you fall and hit your head.”
The helmet gained popularity from 2015 until 2019, but this increase has stopped in recent years. A new bicycle helmet count shows that now 47 percent of the cyclists in Danish cities wear one.
From 2015-2019, the police have registered 633 cyclists who have either been seriously injured or who have lost their lives as a result of a head injury. In the capital, the most were registered: 249.
According to the campaign, one of the most common reasons for not wearing a helmet is that one has simply not gotten used to cycling with the helmet and therefore forgets it.
Others are vain or find helmets annoying or cumbersome to wear and some feel that they are so good at cycling that they do not need a helmet to protect them or completely drop it on short rides.
Rådet for Sikker Trafik gives four tips to encourage helmet wearing which are;
Buy a nice helmet that fits well
Hang it close to your outerwear or bike so you remember it
Hang it on the bike when you shop
Have a comb in your pocket to straighten your locks when you arrive
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Married to Ophelia in Gibraltar in 1978, John has spent much of his life travelling on security print and minting business and visited every continent except Antarctica. Having retired several years ago, the couple moved to their house in Estepona and John became a regular news writer for the EWN Media Group taking particular interest in Finance, Gibraltar and Costa del Sol Social Scene. Share your story with us by emailing [email protected], by calling +34 951 38 61 61 or by messaging our Facebook page www.facebook.com/EuroWeeklyNews
This short movie is entertaining, but hopelessly fails to get its message across, but since the message is pointless, that isn’t really a problem.
Despite all the helmet propaganda, the myths, the lies and the tens of thousands of “helmet saved my life” stories, the death rate of cyclists does not fall as helmet wearing rates rise. Given that they are fairly flimsy pieces of plastic, expecting them to take the force of a car crashing into them is optimistic in the extreme. In Australia, when they brought in their cycle helmet law, the risk to cyclists went up, not down, and the only proven effect was to deter people from cycling. Because regular cycling confers so many health benefits, the overall effect was large and negative because so many people lost those benefits.
Strange that the Danes, in one of the safest countries to ride a bicycle, because of their actions in reducing the danger from drivers, is putting out propaganda like this for an intervention which has been proven to fail wherever it has been tried.
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