Update – Police have arrested a former University of Calgary Dinos employee after a video posted online showed him spitting on a woman and yelling a racial slur.
The video begins with a woman longboarding down a pathway in a Calgary park while her boyfriend is filming.
Moments later, a male cyclist is seen approaching couple in the opposite direction.
Almost as soon as the pair passes each other, that’s when the male cyclist is seen spitting at the woman, who is Asian, and hurls profanity at her based on her race.
The cyclist disappears out of frame down the pathway, but the reaction is immediate.
“What the f— dude?” the woman says on the Instagram video. “Are you f—ing kidding me?”
In the post, the couple alleges the cyclist then went to spit at another couple behind them who were both Caucasian. But none of that is shown in the video.
“We are outraged,” the poster writes. “I can’t believe I caught this on video. So much for a Saturday night out, hey?”
Since the video went online, it has had thousands of views and hundreds of comments calling the man’s actions “absolutely disgusting” and a possible case of aggravated assault, given the COVID-19 pandemic.
CTV News has made contact with the couple. The woman in the video, Jessica Lau, says she didn’t know how to react when it happened.
“Obviously the most natural reaction was a little bit of swearing and just (being) taken aback,” she told CTV News Sunday. “It was a slow realization that, ‘Wow this does happen in Calgary unfortunately and in Canada.'”
Lau says this was the first time she’s experience racism in her entire life and adds she has gone to get tested for coronavirus as a result of the interaction.
Further social media posts that have come out since the video went online have drawn a connection between the cyclist and the University of Calgary Dinos. The university and the school’s athletic department both say he was a former employee.
