My friend stacked it in some dirt just yesterday. He'd been riding 4 days and I took him to a quite stretch of country lane and a practically abandoned round-a-bout so he could get some practice in. Just on the way up to the round-a-bout he got a poor read on a corner and was riding outside his limits trying to keep up with me. He took the corner wide and went down in the dirt after a short bit of offroading.
At the time he was incredibly annoyed, we picked his bike up and there were very minor scratches on it and he chilled down a bit. I was cracking jokes to try and cheer him up and saying everything was okay. A few hours after, however, reality hit me like a train. I felt like I was entirely to blame.
I had taken him to an area he didn't know, I was riding as hard as I could and he was just trying to keep up with me. If I wasn't riding as hard as I possibly could, then he more than likely wouldn't of made a mess of the corner. I found this incredibly difficult to cope with. I took the blame entirely as my own, and to see his parent's faces after he'd been riding only 4 days, but spent 2 years trying to convince them to let him have a bike, it really dug deep. I just didn't know how to cope.
This all happened yesterday, even now I feel like absolute crap over it. He's fine, scratched his knees up with a minor bit of road rash. But I have an emotional weight hanging heavily on my mind. That's what is truly the worst part about bike crashes. It's not the physical injury that he suffered, but the emotional anxiety and anguish it causes the rider and those riding with him.