You are listening to Kilometer Zero by the Cycling Podcast powered by super

savings, energy management for committed athletes and coaches.

In the land of Mark Peron's birth and youth, the final days of May in first

week of June this year, like many since the Ukrainian Revolution of 2014,

throbbed with anxiety and echoed with mortar and gunfire. According to

Ukrainian joint forces between May the 26th and May the 30th, pro-Russian troops

and tanks broke the latest notional ceasefire between the two sides 15 or more

times. The attacks had become so frequent in the Donbass region that they were

are now part of daily life. Like the widely held view that there is no

neat emphatic resolution of the conflict in sight. Either Donbass returning to

its former life as the uncontested easternmost outpost of Ukraine or Russia

taking control of the region like it did with Crimea in 2014.

Happily for Mark Peron, his parents didn't hear the gunfire for they had

fled the region and the bullets earlier in what is misleadingly referred to

as the revolution of dignity. Peron himself was also well out of harms way,

racing in the Criterion Dudofinet in France. And on the race's final we

can't in the Alps causing a sensation by winning back-to-back stages.

His post-race interviews were also a revelation, introducing to the global

cycling audience a bright-eyed effervescent character

totally at odds with the stereotypes that have lingered about riders from

former Soviet block nations. The Ukrainian rider from the Bahrain

victorious is going to do the unthinkable. He's going to make it

...