bike enables footballer to misbehave

today appeared a story in some newspapers about a professional footballer getting intoxicated and doing something stupid.

that is nothing particularly surprising you might think.

you also might wonder what that has to do with this blog about bicycles...

fair enough question.

well.... the article was describing the events and then stated:

"Bendtner was apparently accompanied by three friends, one of whom had a bicycle."

My first thought that this was an irrelevant detail, but that it somehow made the story more salacious because there was someone with a bicycle in the group. Obviously those with bikes are troublemakers eh?!

Anyway, it turns out the bike actually had a significant role in the events that followed. Essentially, Bendtner et al used the the time it took for the he taxi driver to mount and dismount the bike from the rack to misbehave. 

Without the bike, they might just have all got in the taxi and got a lift home.

And that would definitely not have been a newsworthy story... though perhaps it would have been a nice change...

Overall, a shameful moment in the bicycle's history of being a significant non-human actor in social networks.... 

(With apologies to Callon, Latour and others... for a little bit about Actor Network Theory see the wikepedia entry, or, for a lot more on it you can go here or to Latour's homepage. For more on taxis with bike racks in Copenhagen see these images and read a post at Copenhagenize.)