[alanmcorcoran]

Same thing happened in my class. There were two girls we were sure were going to fail (they had dropped bikes, couldn't shift, had trouble with the eight, etc.) but at least one of them passed. A guy that had a pretty serious Harley (and looked like a stereotypical badass biker) went down hard on the swerve after pretty much waltzing through the rest of the course.

He wasn't hurt badly, but, he didn't get up right away and he was limping pretty good when he got up. His brother was in the other class on the other side of the giant parking lot and he came to collect him. It was one of the sadder walks of shame I witnessed that year.

I had a similar slow speed version of this one about 800 miles in on the Strat - came around a corner in a parking lot at slow speed and a guy came whipping around another corner ahead of me, and I instinctively grabbed the brakes (and went right down.) Very minor damage to the bike in my case - the windshield, the floorboard and the brake lever took the impact and got some scratches. I managed to exit the bike before it hit and was unscathed.

I'm very careful with the brakes when I'm not going straight now!

They probably ought to stress what will happen if you use the brakes at the wrong time on that one a little more. I think in my case, they mentioned that it's best to brake before (as in "ideal") but not that it could really hurt if you brake during.

In any case, most of us, if not all of us on here, have had a kerfluffle or two (and quite a few have had much more than that.) Some of it is the learning curve, some of it is stupidity or over confidence, and sometimes it just ain't your day. If you enjoyed riding, it might premature to hang it up based on one mistake.