Kulddy's Highside

I know it’s been a long time since you’ve heard from me and it’s not that I didn’t want to write .to put it simply, the things you do when you're young have dire future unforeseeable consequences. For example when I,was younger (much younger) I was doing warm up-hot laps on a H2R and the downtubes pulled out of the steering head (un known to me) when the tire bit in second gear, coming on to the straight and about third or fourth I noticed that the front end felt really funny. On that bike, when you went through the gears the front tire just barely skimmed the surface (and then only when you notched up to the next gear) and the tanks we used to run were called turtles they were fat wide and did kinda look like a turtle shell {except for the knee cutouts.) and you could not see around them (not that iwould have known what to look for anyway).

Any way to make a long story short when I ran out of gears and straight and throttle, I quit trying to stretch the throttle and backed off, the steering head (and the front fork assembly, including everything attached to it made an abrupt forward motion and right turn. Needless to say that at about a160+ the results were spectacular to say the least.

When the front dug in (from lack of support) and flipped it onto the rear tire the first time it just kinda skidded while still upside down, but then it bit and I went around about twice (still doing about 160 or so with my knees trapped under the clip-ons) then when it came down the second time it really spun up (you must remember that the center of mass was about dead center of the engine which meant that every thing else rotated around it{of most concern was myself.}). Well when the rear tire hit/bit it launched the whole package about. Forty or fifty feet in the air, spinning at about 200rpms. I am sorry that I only remember about the first two or three spins (after that I redded out {too much blood pressure, the result one of which while quite kool had a serious effect on my love life{not that racers ever really had one in those days} was that it hemorrhaged both eyes), and I looked like Dracula for about a year.

When I came too in the hospital they told me I was lucky and that the casts on my legs would come off in about ten weeks. The down side was that they could not fix all the torn ligaments and damaged cartilage.

Well fast forward to 1976 and Denver general and a patient with blue cross blue shield, and the orthopedic surgeon from the Denver broncos. They told me they could fix my knees and could do them about two weeks apart (now mind you I never stopped riding or racing, just had to keep muscle tension on them or the joints would slip {dislocate}). The first one went fine (left) but the second one took longer than expected and they had to give me a unit of blood (not mine) and since it is a very rare type they had to get what they could. In those days wino’s, junkie’s, and the less fortunate were the main suppliers of blood. And they did not screen for anything but syphilis, and even if they had screened for hepatitis they did not even know about "hep C" at the time. So they loaded me up with this hep c tainted blood (they thought there might be something wrong when I started turning yellow, but they were perplexed.

And the sad thing is it still gives them fits.

For the last six months I have bee on an experimental gene therapy and most days was so sick I couldn’t piss without help, so I quit it (the therapy requires you to inject this gene/chromosomal mixture three times a week. The sickness part was not the BAD part it also causes ,among other effects, suicidal tendencies and severe depression, hair loss and a weird increase in aural senses (loud noises made louder) and insomnia (during the last two weeks I slept for two hours –TOTAL. As you can see it was making me quite mad.

As most of you already know I NEVER give up and will try to start it again in October.

So that my dear,dear readers is what was up.

The racing column itself will have to wait until this coming Monday, which coincidentally is the first day of spring .

Sorry to take so long but I figured I owed you the truth and apologize for the lapse in my column.

If my publisher will forgive me and print this I will promise you all a review of bike week and the GP season on Monday evening.

Thanks for your support

Kulddy Jones

Please send any comments or suggestions to me here. See you next time.