A little over a year ago, the Anchorage Daily News printed a photo of a competitor at an extreme skiing event at Alyeska mid-somersault. The photo seemed unremarkable enough—a tumbling speck of a skier in a story about extreme skiing—until you read the caption. That was where you learned that that fall ended the life of the skier, 27-year-old John Nicoletta.

I thought of Nicoletta’s death and the photo that captured it when I saw another ADN photo recently. Like that of Nicoletta’s final moments, this one was on the back page of the A section (though not attached to any story). Like the other shot, this one required a caption to convey its gravity. The photo shows the intersection of Tudor and Elmore Roads. It’s partially blocked off with traffic cones, but traffic, including a People Mover bus, still flows through. In the background, a pedestrian bridge arches above the thoroughfare, and in the middle sits a cyclist, waiting for her opportunity to cross the street.

What dominates the foreground, though, and the true subject of the picture, is a yellow bike, that looks to have been abandoned carelessly on the pavement, only moments before. If you don’t look carefully, you won’t notice that the frame is a little bit crinkled, and the rear tire is ever so slightly bent. And if you didn’t read the caption, you wouldn’t know that the bike was left there after its rider, broadsided by a car, was rushed to the hospital. Police say the vehicle was going about 45 mph. The biker, 44-year-old Anchorage resident Jason Hustead, died shortly after he arrived at the hospital. In the wake of Nicoletta’s death, the ADN came in for a lot of criticism, much of it from the extreme skiing community, for publishing the photo. Among the more thoughtful discussions that followed was one about whom such tragedies belong to. The extreme skiing community felt like one of their family had been put on display—ghastly entertainment for morbid rubberneckers. The opposing view held a more public ownership of the tragedy and its lessons. ADN outdoor columnist Craig Medred defended this view in an email to one of the upset members of the ski community.

“As for any journalistic benefit, well, your e-mail makes a strong case for there being that. The photo is gut-wrenching; ergo it's got to help make people understand what it means when we talk about terrain where you fall—you die,” he wrote.

I don’t expect that there will be the same level of outrage from the biking community—or from anyone really—over this latest photo. Although the two of them are similar, they’re also different in important ways. For one thing, this photo—with its mangled bike, and another cyclist further back in the frame—only suggests the presence of the victim, while the Nicoletta shot put his final moments inescapably, and uncomfortably, in front of the viewer. For another, biking on city roads doesn’t have the exotic appeal that extreme skiing does. Die while on a quest for athletic glory, and you become an interesting story; die in a traffic accident, and, well, you’re just another statistic.

But why should that be the case? Nicoletta’s death—and the coverage that followed, including the photo—sparked a lot of good discussion about the nature of extreme skiing competitions. Are they safe enough? Is there too much pressure to take risks, either from peers or corporate sponsors?

Just as I don’t believe anyone will be particularly outraged by the publication of this photo (and for the record, I come down in favor of publishing both of them), I also don’t think that Hustead’s death will spark much public discussion about bicycle safety in Anchorage.

And that’s a shame. His death isn’t the first in recent months. Last winter, the Press wrote about the appearance of Anchorage’s first ghost bike—a bike painted all in white to commemorate Jonathan Johnson, a cyclist who was killed in a collision with an SUV at C Street and 40th. APD’s traffic unit wasn’t able to compile stats for us by press time, but our inboxes have been peppered with other notices of deaths and injuries related to bike-auto collisions since then.

All during this time, there’s been a low-level debate going on about the appropriateness of Anchorage including a bike component in its long-range transportation plan. Better bike planning and better bike paths won’t necessarily prevent accidents. But it’s about the best starting place I can think of if we’re serious about tackling these problems.

And if deaths like Johnson’s and Hustead’s push us to take that more seriously, to think about changes to our communities that will prevent such deaths from happening in the future, that will be one small thing our community can salvage from those tragedies.

krestia.degeorge@anchoragepress.com