Frédéric de Lanouvelle got on his bicycle with an idea that sounded impossible: to draw a flower so large that it could only be seen from a map.
For 37 days, he pedaled without any real rest, covering between 150 and 180 kilometers a day, crossing 40 departments of France and accumulating nearly 60.000 meters of elevation gain. Each turn of his wheel was recorded by GPS, gradually tracing the petals of a flower that would only take shape at the end of the journey. He called it ‘The Flower of Hope’, a name he did not choose at random: his mother had died in 2024, after living with Alzheimer’s for almost twenty years.
He was not pedaling to escape the pain, but to turn it into something useful. Every kilometer raised funds for the Fondation Recherche Alzheimer, and when he got off his bicycle for the last time, Guinness World Records certified his feat as the largest bicycle GPS drawing ever made. A flower impossible to see from the asphalt, but visible forever from the sky.
