MICHAEL DEACON (Letters, June 24) knows nothing about the “personalities” the participants in the Naked Bike Ride and is not qualified to dismiss us as “distasteful and smug”.

He says he “tried not see us” – yet failed? That’s excellent news, Mr Deacon! If we had cycled past clothed you wouldn’t have seen us. That’s exactly the reason we ride naked, because the most common and lamentable excuse given to police after a driver has crushed the bones, blood and life out of a cyclist is: “I didn’t see them.”

Mr Deacon must have excellent eyesight too, as we barely (no pun intended) saw the school sports day in the far corner of a field some 200 metres away as we cycled past. Someone that observant surely can’t have missed the unbiased reports on the York ride published in The Press since 2006?

When spotted, we had just come from pausing at Knavesmire to remember Ruby Milnes, the young cyclist killed there by a lorry in 2008.

Cyclist deaths are the real obscenity, as is the pathetic value the courts place on a human life and the paltry sentences given to killers of cyclists on Britain’s roads.

Barry Freeman, Shaftesbury, Dorset.