A road cyclist in Hampshire had his nose broken with a bottle of vodka earlier this month after a shocking attack from a group of six thugs mocking his high-visibility street wear.
43-year-old Anthony Stokes was cycling home to Southsea at 1.10am after a night out on Friday June 5th, when a group of 20-something assailants started to make fun of the cycling gear he was wearing.
Anthony stopped to speak to the group, and was then victim to the shocking assault, with one man pulling him from his bike by his rucksack and the group then kicking him for 20-30 seconds before two others intervened to put an end to the violence.
Stokes said: “Six people were kicking me down the street. I just went into the foetal position. I was thinking ‘this is going to hurt’. It felt like a lifetime but it was only 20 or 30 seconds. What surprised me was the viciousness.
“There were six people and I didn’t realise [that]. I got a bit of lip and my biggest mistake was stopping and defending myself. It wasn’t a fair fight.”
“Luckily I had a helmet on and [the bottle of vodka] caught me underneath it. If those two guys hadn’t interjected I would have been a lot worse. I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The horrific attack in Hampshire comes on the back of several other shocking incidents in the UK led by “anti-cycling sentiment”, including road races being sabotaged with pins and trip-wires being set up as booby-traps for riders.
Stokes suffered not only a broken nose, but also a cut eyebrow, bruising to his left side and ribs and to the inside of his legs and back as well.
According to Portsmouth News, he described three of the assailants as one white woman in her early 20s with permed black hair, a leather jacket and white leggings with gold trim, one stocky white woman in her early to mid-20s with brown hair in a bob and a “red sunburnt complexion”, and one white man in his mid-to-late-20s around 6ft tall wearing a baseball cap and red rain coat.
If you have any information about the incident, you are requested to contact PC Samanatha Hockley on 101, or Crimstoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.