A fit and healthy cyclist who fell from his bike in Richmond Park died because he had scar tissue on his heart, an inquest heard this week.

Martyn Dobson, 30, moved to Kingston and then Richmond Hill specifically so he could cycle in the park every week, his girlfriend said.

He would regularly cycle up to 44km at a time and had been a competitive cyclist since he was a teenager.

But on Wednesday, December 17 last year, he collapsed off his bike on a road between Richmond Gate and Pembroke Lodge and died an hour later in Kingston Hospital at 4.15pm.

Witnesses saw him start out confidently but noticed him start to wobble and lose his rhythm before falling on the verge with the bike still around his ankles.

A GP, nurse and Kingston Hospital consultant all happened to be driving past when he fell. They rushed to his aid, along with a passing fire crew.

Pathologist Dr Robert Chapman, who analysed his heart tissue, put his heart failure down to scarring that could have been caused by an infection many years before.

His family suspect it was never detected because he was usually so fit and healthy he rarely visited his doctor.

Mr Dobson, a computer software programmer, had been off work with flu-like symptoms and sickness for the previous two days but the pathologist said that was unlikely to have contributed to his death.

Mr Dobson was brought up near Middlesbrough and went to Teeside University but moved to London in 2005 because he liked “life in the fast lane”, his father Michael Dobson said.

He introduced his girlfriend of three years, Anna Zach, to his favourite hobby of cycling when the pair lived together in Seven Kings Road, Kingston, in 2007.

She said: "Every weekend whether it was raining or not, we were in Richmond Park cycling together.

"I can’t go there to cycle now because it’s too painful. He was always telling me to pedal faster or get up on the bike. He was training me."

A verdict of death by natural causes was recorded at the inquest on Tuesday, June 9.

Coroner Alison Thompson said: "The awful irony was that he was so health conscious and extremely fit."

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