[The Evening Standard – Click link for video] This is the moment a cyclist was punched in the face after confronting a motorist who nearly knocked him off his bike.

The 47-year-old man had been riding his bicycle along Ripple Street, Barking at around 6pm on Sunday, October 4, when the suspect allegedly drove past in a silver Audi A4, narrowly missing the cyclist before parking outside a grocery shop.

As the suspect got out of his car, the cyclist approached him and questioned him about his driving, police said. 

The driver went into a greengrocers and the cyclist waited outside for him to come out. When he did, he punched the cyclist three times in the face, knocking him to the ground, before running off down King Edwards Road.

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Okay, so I obviously don’t condone physical violence against bicyclists. But we can all agree that the bicyclist playing the victim card here is ridiculous, right?

I mean first off, this bicyclist stalked the dude all the way to the grocery store and waited outside like a psychopath. I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that the dude thought his safety was being threatened and reacted appropriately.

But more importantly, how can you even call this assault? I’ve watched that video at least 45 times and I swear every single time I expect the bicyclist to move out of the way. How the fuck do you just let yourself get clocked in the face like that? In the amount of time it took the guy to wind up for that punch, that bicyclist could have literally built a brick wall between them. He could have biked to the hardware store, bought a sack of bricks, mixed a batch of cement, read a book on how to build a brick wall, and then built it. I’ve never seen a person take so long to wind up for a punch. He put his entire body weight into it. He telegraphed exactly what he was doing and where it was going to go. And the bicyclist still couldn’t get out of the way.

It’s just the latest chapter in the saga of bicyclists not living on the same planet as the rest of us. It didn’t even enter this guy’s brain that he might get punched. Nowhere in the course of him formulating a plan that involved stalking a stranger and cornering them outside a grocery store did it occur to this lunatic that things might get physical. Even when the guy hauled back for the punch, I’m pretty sure the bicyclist just thought he was falling over. “By golly,” he no doubt thought to himself, “the sheer force of my argument has incapacitated this fellow and knocked him to the ground! What a perfect specimen of humanity I am!”

As I always say, I don’t endorse punching bicyclists. But that doesn’t mean I feel any sympathy, either.