Rachel Rock Palermo

There will be too much senseless heartbreak in this story, so let’s open with the joy the cyclist surely felt in the last hour of his life. It was two days after Christmas in 2014. The cyclist had spent the early part of the day with his family — his wife, Rachel, and his children, Sadie and Sam, 6 and 4 at the time — and his wife urged him to go for a ride. The weather conditions were beyond unseasonably warm.