€200,000 bike heist hits Bas Tietema's Unibet Rose Rockets before AirTag leads police to stolen haul on 12th floor

Twelve race bikes worth close to €200,000 had disappeared, Unibet Rose Rockets were scrambling to find replacements ahead of two Spanish races and the stolen equipment could have been anywhere. Less than two days later, French police found the bikes virtually intact inside an apartment on the twelfth floor of a building in Poitiers.

The unlikely breakthrough came from an Apple AirTag hidden inside a mechanic's toolbox which had been taken along with the bikes. Once the tracker began moving, police had their first lead in a theft that Bas Tietema believes carried the signs of a much more deliberate operation.

Unibet Rose Rockets had stopped near Poitiers while travelling to Spain for the Ordiziako Klasikoa and Clasica Castilla y Leon when their team truck was broken into. Twelve bikes were taken along with wheelsets, equipment and tools, leaving the team facing the prospect of reaching its next races without the machinery its riders were supposed to use. Contemporary reports put the break-in on the night of 22 to 23 July.

“If you're a cycling team and you don't have any bikes anymore, then obviously things become pretty difficult,” Tietema told AD.

The stolen bikes alone represented an enormous loss. A professional race bike can cost around €10,000 before additional wheelsets, computers, power meters and other equipment are included.

Their distinctive appearance also left Tietema wondering what the thieves intended to do with a dozen brightly coloured machines belonging to a recognisable professional team. “If you want to sell them, you'd have to repaint them anyway. That takes quite a bit of work and time,” he said. “You need to have a market for them. We would recognise the bikes immediately online, even if they were a different colour. There are numbers underneath them as well.”

Mechanic Schultz had placed an AirTag inside his toolbox. When its location was detected close to a golf course near where the Rockets had stayed, police followed the signal and discovered a vehicle containing loose equipment including wheels and helmets. The bikes were still missing.

“We had an AirTag in the toolbox, which they had also taken,” Tietema explained. “Suddenly we saw that it started moving. Then we had a trail. That was our salvation. Without that tag, we would never have found the equipment again.”

The search eventually moved to an apartment building in Poitiers. All 12 bikes were discovered on the twelfth floor, reportedly almost completely intact, while French police also made an arrest following their recovery.

Tietema was less surprised by their condition than by where they had ended up. “If you want to sell them or do something with them, you obviously have to look after them yourself to some extent,” he said. “If you start throwing them around and everything gets broken, you're only hurting yourself.”

Another discovery immediately caught Tietema's attention. Alongside the Rockets equipment was a toolbox belonging to Soudal – Quick-Step. “What I'm curious about is whether this was organised crime,” he said. “This obviously wasn't a lucky shot. A toolbox belonging to Soudal Quick-Step was also found in that warehouse. So that tells you this wasn't just something random.”

Removing 12 professional bikes from a team truck is hardly an inconspicuous operation either. The bikes are secured inside and must be individually released, requiring both time and at least some understanding of how the equipment is stored.

“You don't just walk away with twelve bikes,” said Tietema. “Unlike cash or jewellery, you can't simply throw them into a car. And you're not finished in a minute either.”

His questions therefore stretch beyond whoever physically entered the Rockets truck. “How do they know where a truck like that is parked? Are they scouting on motorways? Are they looking around hotels?”

Professional cycling has been confronted by several large-scale equipment thefts in recent seasons. During the 2025 Vuelta a Espana, 18 bikes belonging to Team Visma | Lease a Bike were stolen, with CEO Richard Plugge putting the value of the missing equipment at around €250,000. Days later, TotalEnergies lost 20 bikes at the Tour Poitou-Charentes, while 11 Cofidis bikes had been stolen during that year's Tour de France before being recovered.

Former Soudal – Quick-Step boss Patrick Lefevere argued at the time that teams were dealing with organised gangs rather than opportunistic thieves. He described the thefts as effectively being carried out to order and recalled footage from an earlier Quick-Step robbery in Tuscany in which a gang reached the team's vehicles by driving through a vineyard and cutting through a hotel fence.

Teams have responded with alarms, reinforced security and deliberately positioning trucks so their rear doors cannot easily be accessed, but valuable equipment continues to disappear from hotels and race accommodation.

Tietema sees no straightforward way of eliminating that risk. “We obviously can't take a security team everywhere with us. Sometimes we have three races at the same time,” he said. “Compare it to your house. You can secure it extremely well, but you can't remove somebody's willingness to try.”

Finding the stolen equipment did not solve the team's immediate racing problem. The bikes were recovered within two days, but there was not enough time to reunite them with the riders already preparing to race in Spain.

Unibet Rose Rockets staff had begun transporting replacements from the Netherlands almost immediately after discovering the theft, while riders were warned that they might need their own training bikes. The squad eventually made the start of both Spanish races using hastily prepared spare machines. “They first had to be completely built up again,” Tietema said. “That takes an incredible amount of work, especially with all the riders' individual setups.”

The Rockets did not feature prominently in either race, although Tietema refused to blame the result on the replacement equipment. The original bikes, meanwhile, returned from their unexpected trip to the twelfth floor having never left Poitiers. The presence of equipment from another professional team left the circumstances surrounding how they got there considerably less tidy than the recovery itself.