A week after the Italian national track team had 22 bikes stolen from their hotel at the UCI Track World Championships in Roubaix, Romanian police recovered hundreds of thousands of euros in stolen goods in their country.
The Pinarellos, including four gold bikes used by Filippo Ganna and his gold medal-winning Team Pursuit teammates, were recovered by Romanian police in the course of a massive drug bust on Thursday.
Police caught the perpetrators in the act, who were trying to sell some of the bikes, worth a total of about 600,000 euros.
The bikes were found during a raid, along with other stolen property, including eight televisions, ten cell phones, drugs, and €2,800 in cash. Twenty people were arrested as part of the investigation.
The bikes had originally gone missing last Friday, two days before the end of the Truck World Championships, while stored in a van in the secure parking lot of the Italian team's hotel in Lille. Several of the bikes incorporated titanium 3D-printed handlebars, and the Team Pursuit team's bikes were painted gold and worth 30,000 euros each.
"They were well organized," Roberto Amadio, head of the Italian delegation, told La Gazzetta dello Sport (open in new tab) about the heist. So we decided to stay in a hotel with private, monitored parking, even if the daily commute was somewhat difficult."
[12"Obviously, even these measures did not stop the culprits."
Aside from the bike theft, which did not disrupt the last two days of the World Championships for Italy because the proper bikes were stored at the Roubaix stadium, the team had a successful week in France, winning four gold, three silver and three bronze medals.
Ganna, Liam Bertazzo, Simone Consonni, and Jonathan Milano won gold in the men's team pursuit; Letizia Paternoster and Martina Fidanza won gold in the women's elimination and scratch races; Elia Viviani won gold in the men's gold medals in the women's elimination and scratch races, and Elia Viviani won gold in the men's elimination race.
Romanian police released a video of the recovered bikes.
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