All will be explained but we lead with the news that these cyclists are intrepid Canberrans (so we are being comfortingly parochial after all) and that the event we see them engaged in here has raised has raised $130,000 for The Kids Cancer Project. The mighty cheque will be presented on Friday in the kitsch splendour of the Hellenic Club.

Now, the folk in our picture belong to a team of 25 Canberrans, augmented by several Danish riders and helpers, taking part in a marathon seven-days, 200 kilometres a day cycle ride from Denmark to Paris. Here we see them well on their way, but posed on the top of horrifically steep Huy (pronounced Hugh) hill, in Belgium.

We will rejoin them up there in a moment but must explain that the Canberra team took part in this year's Team Rynkeby project that, from modest beginnings in 2002, has seen teams of mostly Scandinavian cyclists (in 2013 some 985 riders took part in 14 Danish teams, six Swedish teams and a Finnish team) pedalling from Denmark to Paris. The project was conceived in Denmark and takes its name from a cancer-stricken employee of Denmark's Rynkeby Foods.

The cyclists do this, attracting personal and corporate sponsors, to raise money for research into cancers that beset children. Late last year Canberra's Denmark-attuned Bjarne Kragh, had the idea that a Canberra team might join in 2014's Rynkeby event. Recruiting and training and sponsor-seeking began in October.

Just days after the scene in our photograph they all arrived in Paris and after crossing the finishing line (in a park close to the Eiffel Tower) were all, according to Kragh, "teary, emotional and happy and then crying and hugging and dancing, and everything."

Augmented by the Canberrans this year's bigger-than-ever event attracted 1200 cyclists and the Parisians, bless them, acknowledged the size and spirit of the event by enabling there to be a grand finale. Kragh reports, still sounding awed by it, that roads and boulevards were closed to allow the converging, Paris-arriving 1200 to all muster at 2pm "at a massive intersection". From there, "led by a sexy policewoman on a bicycle" (alas, my calling's sacred code of ethics requires me to quote him accurately) the 1200 cascaded together along 10 kilometres that led them along the Champs de Elysee and underneath the Eiffel Tower to the finishing place.

They were all bound to be emotional and ecstatic after such an effort but what made it especially poignant was that they had all endured so much together.

"It was the hardest year ever [of the Rynkeby]," Kragh recalls with some horror. "It was way too cold and too wet. We had some crashes [slippery roads] but we didn't ever have any broken bones, just a bit of blood. And we were cycling every day from 8am to 5pm and remember none of us were professional riders. We were all just physios, doctors, public servants ... who'd jumped on our bikes [in October of 2013] and trained."

"So it was physically very challenging, even though we were all [from training] in very good shape. We had a sense of being pushed to our absolute limits. But we kept remembering the charity we were riding for and it helped us to remind ourselves that our little but of pain was nothing to what happens to a child with leukemia."

And so the elation at the end ("The sense of achievement was enormous") was understandable.

In our extraordinary picture, Kragh illuminates, we see the Canberra team, in the rain atop Huy hill, giving a team "bike salute" (wheels raised) to another team that (after all teams had paused on top of the hill to recover from the cruel ascent and to have lunch) was just setting off again in the direction of Paris.

To give Canberrans and especially Canberra cyclists an idea of what a brute the Huy hill is Kragh asks us to imagine our very own famous "Fitz's Hill" (far beyond Tharwa) but a steeper and shorter version of it. Huy hill is only about 1200 metres but at its worst has an incline of 26 degrees and so "not everyone gets up it [without getting off and walking]". He noticed, proudly, that the Canberra team (perhaps thanks to the experience of Fitz's) did far better than the other teams at ascending lung-bursting Huy without having to dismount. He says it was a particular shock for the Danes, used to gliding effortlessly across their pancake-flat kingdom. They'd never seen anything like Huy.

Next year, and for charity, exploiting the famous cycling-madness of Canberrans, Kragh is going to organise a Rynkebyesque fundraising event here in our region, bound to be blessed with less dastardly weather. It will follow a "Canberra to Canberra" course that will take riders to Bowral and beyond, over the hills and far away. It will struggle to provide a finale as grand (or as sexist) as the Paris one, for we have no Eiffel Tower and can't imagine the politically correct ACT government sanctioning deployment of a sexy policewoman on a bicycle, but the cause will be a fine one.