Kudos to the NBC news team. After many of you called out the driver’s license plate, the news team decided to do something about it and hunt down the man in the video:

Claiming my friend hit his car is wrong and physically impossible. Let me break it down referring to the video itself:

 

If the driver was to have been assaulted, it obviously would have been done with my friend’s left hand which is visible from the start of the video in the drop position. At the :14 second mark, the two cyclists are passed by an SUV, meaning the driver in question was not a factor until after then.

At the :16 second mark of the video, we hear the car first honk and the first cyclist starts to scan behind him. My friend’s left hand disappears from view in the :17 mark, but the important clue is audio. You can hear the clicking from shifting gears at this point, which is impossible to do without holding both hands and staying upright at that speed.

His hands are obviously on the top part of the handlebars(hoods) in order to pull this off. At the :18 mark, the Audi passes the cameraman and the driver nearly hits him. There is no indication in audio of my friend hitting his car and even moreso, the cyclist’s camera remains super steady.

In other words, the cameraman had less than a second from the moment you heard the clicking to when the car passed to pull off such an act.

In order to my friend to have hit the Audi, he would have had to take his hand off the bike and you would have seen a slight veer to the right. Then, you would then have to see the bike veer in towards the driver to counterbalance the hitting motion followed by a second, highly violent jilt in the camerawork after the act occurred, which is clearly not in the video.

Try hitting or maneuvering any object with one hand while riding at a high speed without majorly altering your course. Your bike would veer significantly.

Even when the driver explains what happens, he states that the cyclist hit him with a very loud impact. Could you hear it? And if it was a large slamming like he implies, again, where’s the weave?

Exercise: While sitting in your chair, pretend to be on a bike and go through the motions of hitting a mirror to your side. You’ll understand it takes a lot of force to make that move happen, something that is not exhibited in the video.

And even if he could hit the car with his hand without falling, isn’t the Audi violating the state’s three foot rule?

At the :20 second mark, you can tell his hands are still on his bike because we see the brakes being applied just as the Audi assaults the second cyclist. In other words, had the cameraman taken a swipe at the car, to balance and grab the handlebars that quickly to brake would have caused another jilt in the camera work. It’s not there.

And if you’re in the frame of mind thinking the cyclists pestered the driver earlier, all that video is saved up too.

There are even more nuances in the video that are inconsistent with the driver’s statement, but I’ll let everyone else have fun with that.

But wait, there’s more. Look at this piece of the police report the driver filed:

Fact: There are no bike lanes on Chevy Chase. He should have at least looked at google maps before making his statement.

There are sharrows(which are not considered bike lanes) on Chevy Chase, but nowhere before where the incident took place. You can check google maps and match up the video and you can tell the assault took place at the point where the very first sharrow appears.

Just match up the change in pavement surfaces in the videos with the aerials. The road widens at this point and then the sharrows appear. In other words, the honking and aggressiveness took place well before this point.

Also, his claim of moving less than the speed of traffic is false as well. It’s tough to read the speed off of the Garmin device, but you can see they are traveling at 22mph AFTER braking from the assault. Ted Rogers seemed to catch that they were at 27mph when the assault occurred, but I need a second look.

Now the speed limit on Chevy Chase is 30mph, so if we were to take the driver’s words from this statement, then he was driving excessively faster than the posted limit.

You can easily breakdown his claim of honking twice and many other statements in the video.

I also want to add a comment made from someone about the incident, just to have on record. It may be a family member, but I’m blurring the name out for now:

Bottom line, the driver wasn’t smart speaking to the media. Any lawyer would have told him to keep his mouth shut. Instead, now we have his version of the story. And it isn’t very good.