Meltdown: The Race to Escape Nuclear Disaster | Part 1: Chain Reaction
The Cycling Podcast
The Cycling Podcast
4.7 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2026
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Next week the Giro d’Italia will start behind the former Iron Curtain for the third time in five years, specifically in Bulgaria. For Italians, the Giro has always represented the sporting highlight of May – but for those living in Eastern Europe, for half a century, the Peace Race took centre stage.
The 1986 edition was an unforgettable one, for reasons that had nothing to do with cycling. Ten days before the race was due to start in Kyiv, 90 kilometres from there, at the Chernobyl power plant, there was an explosion in one of the reactors. The ensuing catastrophe turned into the worst disaster in the history of nuclear power.
Hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers and hundreds of thousands of evacuations would be required to restore at least the illusion of control. Meanwhile, a cover-up of unprecedented scale and unimaginable consequences began – and allowed the 1986 Peace Race to start in Kyiv.
In the first of this two-part series, Daniel Friebe journeys back in time to the moment of the disaster. He speaks to men who were supposed to travel to Kyiv and didn’t, and to riders who had no option but to race while a vast radioactive cloud spread across Europe and beyond.
Part two will cover what happened when the Peace Race peloton left Kyiv, and over subsequent months and years, as the horrific implications of Chernobyl slowly revealed themselves. That will be released on Wednesday May 6, the day before we travel to Bulgaria to kick off this year’s Girovagando - our daily coverage from the Giro d’Italia.
Meltdown: The Race to Escape Nuclear Disaster is a series written and produced by Daniel Friebe. Episode art is by Daniel Friebe.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There has been a nuclear accident in the Soviet Union and the Soviets have admitted that it happened. |
| 0:08.9 | The Soviet version is this. |
| 0:10.7 | One of the atomic reactors at the Chernobyl atomic power plant in the city of Kiev was damaged. |
| 0:16.0 | And there is speculation in Moscow that people were injured and may have died. |
| 0:19.8 | Given the geopolitical context, the propaganda |
| 0:23.3 | value of the peace race, what it represented, this was one of the highlights of the sporting year, |
| 0:30.4 | and to call it off for a trifle like a nuclear disaster, basically had they called it off, |
| 0:36.9 | it would be tantamount to admitting |
| 0:39.8 | that a disaster had taken place, which of course it had, yeah, but there was no way they were |
| 0:45.4 | going to articulate that, particularly to the west. |
| 0:47.7 | Here's a city of Kiev, population 2.5 million, and about a thousand miles from Scandinavia, |
| 0:53.7 | meaning that whatever did occur in there. |
| 0:57.0 | So you know, you're an athlete, you're in the street and you're breathing heavily. |
| 1:01.0 | You're taking in a lot of air. |
| 1:03.0 | If you breathe in a tiny speck of dust, one of these plutonium particles, then it would go to your lungs. |
| 1:10.0 | And one might many many years later, |
| 1:12.5 | have lung cancer, even though you never smoked and you were a healthy athlete. So it's a |
| 1:17.6 | game of Russian blood. |
| 1:19.0 | The most severe accident that has ever taken place in the short history of civilian nuclear power. |
| 1:26.5 | This May, as every year, the most important race in men's elite cycling will go by the name |
| 1:31.5 | Giro d'italia, even if once again in 2026, the first grand tour of the season will not |
| 1:37.4 | depart from Italy. |
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