French politicians have called for a crackdown on urban dirt-bike riding as a 10-year-old girl was critically ill in hospital after being hit by a motocross bike while she played on a housing estate north-east of Paris.
An 18-year-old boy was being questioned by police on Sunday after he handed himself in at a police station, accompanied by his lawyer.
Local authorities said the accident happened just after 9pm on Friday night in Pontoise when two children, the 10-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy, were playing “catch” in a pedestrianised area beneath their apartment building.
Both children were hit by the motocross bike. Its rider was believed to be taking part in a meet-up of urban dirt-bike riders performing stunts.
The Pontoise public prosecutor’s office told Agence France-Presse that the young girl suffered major head injuries which, if she survives, “will have heavy neurological consequences”. The boy suffered fractures.
An 18-year-old boy, who had initially left the scene before presenting himself to police on Saturday, had admitted being on the motocross bike, the local prosecutor said. He continued to be questioned by police.
France has a strong tradition of urban dirt-bike riding, known as “urban rodeos”, in which teenagers compete to perform prolonged wheelies and stunts on motocross bikes. It is common in the areas around Paris, where police often target what they call illegal gatherings with unregistered bikes. In the Val-d’Oise département, north of Paris, there have been 534 police interventions for urban rodeos since April, with 37 people arrested and 34 bikes seized, local authorities told Agence France-Presse.
In June, a 19-year-old died after he was hit by a motocross bike at an urban rodeo in the Brittany city of Rennes.
During the first term of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in 2018 a new law was passed to toughen punishments for illegal motorbike rodeos, with riders facing up to five years in prison.
Natalia Pouzyreff, a lawmaker for Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party, Renaissance, who co-authored the 2018 law, told France Info radio on Sunday there must be “more systematic confiscations” of motocross bikes. She said there should be more police interventions on the ground and more CCTV cameras in certain areas. She said if arrests were followed by prison sentences “and more radical sanctions” they would have a “dissuasive effect”.
At the Cannes film festival this May, the director Lola Quivoron won an award for Rodéo, the first French feature film about motocross dirt-bike riding. She called it a “social phenomenon” in France.
