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Tour de France in Chaos After Wave of Bike Thefts

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A stage-winning team at the Tour de France has had eleven bikes stolen in an overnight raid on their camp in Saint-Jacques-des-Blats.

TotalEnergies, who won the ninth stage of the 2024 race courtesy of Anthony Turgis, have been counting the cost after the bikes – many of which were actually being ridden in the race – were stolen by thieves overnight following stage eleven.

This will sadly derail their chances of kicking on in the second half of the race – not least those of Turgis, who found himself third in the Points Classification with ten stages left to race.

Gang of Thieves

One of four ProTeam entries in the Grand Tour, TotalEnergies were not expected to be involved in the battle for classification wins given their relative lack of resources. Indeed, the Tour de France 2024 odds for the Team Classification saw TotalEnergies listed far behind the likes of the UAE Team Emirates and Visma-Lease a Bike

Those placing their cycling bets were also pinning their hopes on individuals like Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard, with Turgis and co only likely to pop up prominently on the flat and sprint sections of the Grand Tour.

How they will be able to bounce back from the theft remains to be seen. Each rider has three bikes to their name, but the theft of eleven of them has left the team reeling – particularly as each individual has now become accustomed to their particular race model.

One of TotalEnergies’ riders, Steff Cras, confirmed the loss but admitted only his third-choice bike had been stolen. “They broke into the truck last night and forced to get in,” he said. “They broke open the door at the side and stole eleven bikes. Nobody heard them.”

Getting to Grips

Luckily for the team, their headquarters are in Vendée in Western France. They have been given special dispensation by the Tour to replace the bikes stolen in the raid.

But even so, there are still complications. Turgis, for example, will be without the bike he won stage nine with.

They can be replaced, but there may be a period of readjustment as the rider gets used to their new bike. Turgis, meanwhile, will have to hope his new bike stands up to the rigours of the Tour, given that he won’t have a second vehicle until the replacements arrive.

With tool kits also taken in the robbery, it’s thought that around £120,000 of equipment was stolen in the raid – how the thieves plan to offload eleven professional race bikes without detection, only they know.

Unsurprisingly, teams tend to beef up security during the Grand Tours and other major races – although that’s not to say that theft doesn’t happen.

In 2019, Soudal-Quick-Step – one of the leading teams in professional road racing – had equipment worth thousands of pounds taken from their trucks, while Lifeplus-Wahoo suffered the loss of a whopping 14 bikes as their team members slept during the 2024 Tour of Britain.

As if riding more than 2,000 miles of road, many of which are mountainous, wasn’t hard enough already!

Photo by Árni Svanur Daníelsson on Unsplash

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