Cops and robber games, introduced by Winkler and Nowakowski [41] and independently defined by Quilliot [43], concern a team of cops that must capture a robber moving in a graph. We consider the class of k-chordal graphs, i.e., graphs with no induced (chordless) cycle of length greater than k, k ≥ 3. We prove that k − 1 cops are always sufficient to capture a robber in k-chordal graphs. This leads us to our main result, a new structural decomposition for a graph class including k-chordal graphs. We present a polynomial-time algorithm that, given a graph G and k ≥ 3, either returns an induced cycle larger than k in G, or computes a tree-decomposition of G, each bag of which contains a dominating path with at most k − 1 vertices. This allows us to prove that any k-chordal graph with maximum degree ∆ has treewidth at most (k −1)(∆ −1) +2, improving the O(∆ (∆ −1) k−3) bound of Bodlaender and Thilikos (1997). Moreover, any graph admitting such a tree-decomposition has small hyperbolicity. As an application, for any n-vertex graph admitting such a tree-decomposition, we propose a compact routing scheme using routing tables, addresses and headers of size O(k log ∆ + log n) bits and achieving an additive stretch of O(k log ∆). As far as we know, this is the first routing scheme with O(k log ∆ + log n)-routing tables and small additive stretch for k-chordal graphs.