On the 10th of May, the 1986 Peace Race arrived in Warsaw after four surreal days in Kyiv,

90 kilometres from what remained of the Chernobyl power plant.

Two weeks had now passed since the catastrophic explosions in Chernobyl's reactor four.

The last fire was about to be extinguished, just as one of the engineers whose mistakes

had reportedly led to the meltdown, 33-year-old Alexander Akimov, was dying of radiation sickness in a Moscow hospital.

The bone marrow and fetal liver cell transplants with which doctors had tried to save Akimov had

been in vain. That same afternoon, Olaf Ludwig won his second consecutive stage of the peace race.

With the prologue and four stages down, 11 to go,

Ludwig and the East Germans were starting to look ominous.

Ludwig, of course, always looked ominous.

One of the Bulgarian riders in that 1986 race,

Christo Zaykov, described him to be thus this spring.

A god, you know, you could even talk to him.

It was a god, an extraterrestrial. You couldn't imagine even talking to him. But in fact, talking to

Ludwig about the 1986 peace race was the main reason I'd travel to Klein-Mulligan in late February,

which is not to say that I wasn't also moved by Teva Shure's 95th birthday celebrations.

A remarkable outpouring moved by Teva Shure's 95th birthday celebrations.

A remarkable outpouring for the Peace Race icon par excellence, doused with more than a splash of what Germans call Ostagliu, a slightly guilty, often caveated yearning for life before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Nothing that afternoon seemed to stir memories and emotions quite like a rendition of Ubers-Sieben-Bruggen, literally over seven bridges.

A 1978 ballad about a failed relationship between an East German and a pole that became a sort of unofficial national anthem.

The bridges in the song's lyrics were the metaphorical obstructions to all in life that was romantic or idealistic.

So no surprise that it resonated with East Germans.

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