LOUISVILLE, KY (WAVE) - Two days after a man was struck on his bike by a hit-and-run driver as he participated in a triathlon, officials at E.P. Tom Sawyer State Park are reviewing their procedures.
Planning for the event began in February, about six months in advance of the E.P. Tom Sawyer State Park Triathlon.
As has been done for nearly three decades, off-duty officers were posted at intersections for the 14-mile bike portion of the race, and a park employee served as a bike course director, traveling along the route in a vehicle with cyclists.
It's something organizers say they've been doing for years without any problems. Until the morning of August 1.
Park Manager Chris Head told us officials there have handled this annual event for 28 years, even changing the course 10 years ago to deal with changes to traffic patterns and working around the Kentucky Truck Plant schedule on Chamberlain Lane.
"We scheduled around third shift letting out, so we started a little later in the morning to make sure all that traffic was out," Head said.
That's not all they did to prepare. The security detail included the help of off-duty police officers.
"We hire a company that deals specifically with crowd and traffic control," Head said. "We give them the intersections we want them to be, the intersections we know will have the most traffic value."
Despite planning, Head said nothing could have prepared organizers for what happened Saturday morning.
"Our bike course director was about a quarter of a mile away, she was actually at the intersection when the car came through," he said. "She called and said that there had been an accident and that the police were handling the driver and that I needed to get out there to check on the person injured."
Around 8 a.m., police say 25-year-old Kenneth Yates was speeding on Chamberlain Lane when he hit cyclist John Carr from behind. Police say Yates kept going and was stopped by an off-duty officer working the event.
A commenter on WAVE 3's website who said he took part in Saturday's triathlon had this to say about road conditions before the accident:
"I was a participant in the Sawyer triathlon. I can tell you that the way the event is organized there were not cyclists riding along side each other. There was occasional passing, but for the most part the riders were pretty well strung out along the course and staying to the right-hand side of the roads. Chamberlain Lane (two lanes each direction)itself had very light traffic during the race. I would estimate that I did not see more than 20 cars in 3 to 4 miles of riding. This was all about some one disregarding dui laws (as well as other laws) at 8 am in the morning."
LMPD spokesperson Alicia Smiley says Louisville Metro Police were not responsible for the security detail for this event, and didn't get involved until Carr was struck. That's when officers were dispatched to handle the hit-and-run ultimately shutting down part of Chamberlain Lane for their investigation and ultimately the race, according to Head.
