Hello and welcome to bespoke weekly Tom Fordice in the chair this week.

Now, usually this is a show about the joy of cycling, about all the fun you can have on two wheels,

and we'd hope to be talking about world champion Pettersagan's wonderful win at Parry Rubet.

Instead, we have to look at a tragedy that took place far behind in the death of young Belgian rider Michael Gouletz from the

Verandas villain Kralin team who suffered a cardiac arrest during the race.

With me as always, former track world champion Rob Hales and are more occasional but just

as beloved guest author and bike obsessive Michael Hutchinson. Rob, to underline the magnitude

of this, Parry-RubBays no ordinary race, is it?

It isn't. It's one of the five monuments. It's a one-day classic, organised by ASO, the

organisers of the Tour de France. The thing that makes it special and so unique is the fact

that it's run, a lot of it is run over cobbles it's 257 kilometers in length

you do 93 kilometers before you hit the first sector but then there are 29 sections of cobbles

some not so bad some are what we call baby's heads they're pretty brutal and in total there's

55 kilometers of cobbles.

The weather obviously plays a part, whether it's wet or whether it's dry.

Either way it's not ideal because you've either got the dust or you've got the wet and the rain, the mud.

And it finishes in Rubei on the Velodrome and it's, you know,

cycle racing used to end,

the road racing used to end quite a lot on velodromes,

but this is one of the only ones now that comes in.

So it's spectacular, to say the least.

Now, Michael, the incident with Gouletz was quite early in the race,

...