Six invaluable bikes including Mathieu van der Poel's rainbow-striped special stolen by group of thieves
Cycling
Six unique bicycles belonging to the biggest stars of the cycling peloton, including a special one belonging to world champion Mathieu van der Poel, were stolen by a group of experienced thieves from public exposition in Valkenburg during the night from Thursday to Friday. Police is looking for any leads.
"Six irreplaceable bicycles were stolen on Thursday night," reads a message on the LinkedIn page of Shimano Europe Group. "On Friday morning, our colleagues discovered that the locks had been broken and the bicycles were gone. We are relieved that no one was injured, the theft took place at night without any staff on site."
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According to Wielerflits, thieves entered the Shimano Experience Center in Valkenburg in an extremely professional manner. The bikes are still owned by the teams, but were temporarily on display to the public. The center is extremely popular with 160,000 visitors per year.
One of the stolen bikes is Mathieu van der Poel's Canyon Aeroad. It is a unique example in rainbow colours, with which the Brabant world champion rode to third place in Liège-Bastogne-Liège this year.
Also stolen: the black Specialized S-Works that Julian Alaphilippe rode in yellow for eleven days in the 2019 Tour de France, a Specialized S-Works Tarmac, including green rear fork, belonging to seven-time green jersey winner Peter Sagan from the 2020 Tour. The Pinarello Dogma F12 X-Light of Egan Bernal - with yellow and pink stripes referring to his final victories in the Giro and Tour - from the 2021 Vuelta. The Merida REACTO that Matej Mohoric won the Tour stage to Poligny with last year. And a Scott Foil bike from this year belonging to Fabio Jakobsen.
Each one of these bicycles worth much over 10,000 euros with invaluable stories behind them. "They are priceless because they played a role in writing cycling history, in the Tour de France, at the World Championships, at the Olympic Games and countless other important events in the cycling world."
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- I'm so glad this is what the UCI does, instead of ensuring the safety of the riders. /sarc Abolish the UCI!acem8221-03-2025
- He had a broken zip. UCI are truly idiots.Pedalmasher20-03-2025
- The pressure of being considered a team leader has to get in the way of his development to a degree. He seems to be good physically but maybe there is a mental thing. I don't know, give him some time to grow a bit.awp20-03-2025
- Hey, you can always buy success, and with the stars realigning, Ratcliffe might see an opportunity in funnelling off some of that future public funding for the Manchester stadium project ;-)Mistermaumau20-03-2025
- my favourites: Mad and Tadej. We will see.
maria2024202420-03-2025 - Very difficult to tell without info, it sometimes happens to me but not that often, more on one device than the other. I suspect it has something to do with their extremely heavy advert loading needs for which your set-up might not be tuned and so fails often which might block the exchange of data and then your login credentials aren’t remembered. Might also have to do with cookie or privacy settings not being as tolerant as their data gathering demands? Check how up to date your configuration is first.Mistermaumau20-03-2025
- Idiots. Just give him a warning and move on. there was no time to zip up the jerseyabstractengineer20-03-2025
- It doesn't happen to me, I hope you can fix it.maria2024202420-03-2025
- Does anyone know why this app is CONSTANTLY logging me out?? I have to log in all the time and it's extremely annoyingvappaxbipmv20-03-2025
- A waste of time is jouranlists still asking that when UAE have told everyone multiple times that they will announce their decision after MSRvappaxbipmv20-03-2025