The Race to Escape Nuclear Disaster | Part 2: Zone of Alienation
5/6/20261 hr 9 min
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This week the Giro d’Italia will start behind the old Iron Curtain for the third time in fi...
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First 90 secondsDaniel Friebe· Host0:01
[gentle music] On the 10th of May, the 1986 Peace Race arrived in Warsaw after four surreal days in Kyiv, 90 kilometers from what remained of the Chernobyl power plant. Two weeks had now passed since the catastrophic explosions in Chernobyl's reactor four.
Mikhail Gorbachev· Soundbite0:21
A radioactive cloud headed north across Poland today and into Denmark, where radiation levels were five times normal.
Daniel Friebe· Host0:26
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 a prologue and four stages down, 11 to go, Ludwig and the East Germans were starting to look ominous. Ludwig, of course, always looked ominous. [cheering] One of the Bulgarian riders in that 1986 race, Hristo Zhaikov, described him to me thus this spring. "A god, an extraterrestrial. You couldn't imagine even talking to him."