Steal 11 bicycles worth $11,000 from team Cofidis in the Tour de France
The French team had 11 spare bicycles stolen; five were recovered shortly after.
One of the Cofidis team buses at the Tour de France was robbed last night, with eleven bicycles stolen, a loot valued at more than 100,000 euros, equivalent to $117,000 dollars.
"The door of the workshop truck was forced and eleven of our bicycles were stolen despite the security devices that were in place," the French team said in a statement on Sunday.
"They entered through the good part, the one they saw was the best, they chiseled there and then covered it up well and left everything closed," Bingen Fernández, director of the French team, explained to Cope.
The theft took place in the parking lot of the hotel near Lille, in northern France, where the Cofidis team, for which Spaniards Alex Aramburu and Ion Izaguirre ride, was staying overnight.
Fortunately for the team, the stolen bikes were not their main ones, since they make different models for the Tour.
"We saw that we didn't have the bikes, the good thing is that the racing bikes were there. I think they are so professional, that they know so much, that they even said, well, we'll bring them the spare ones and At least we left them the racing ones,” added Fernández.
“They took our transponder and everything, so we couldn’t follow them and well, in the end we were lucky that they couldn’t fit them all in the van they had and they left some hidden in a forest there and well, they were close and we were able to recover a few, because at the beginning we saw 10-11 bikes that were missing, then we recovered 5,” added Bingen, who admits that they were finally able to leave the stage without any problem after “a awakening that nobody likes to have.”
Last year it was the Total Energies team that saw eleven bicycles stolen from one of its roads in Lorian, in the center of the country, during the Tour.

