Two, sometimes four bicycles at a time, the burglars moved through the shop at pace, the rattling of bike frames audible on the surveillance footage. The images also tell the story of the damage left behind: a completely shattered window and overturned bicycle racks strewn across the shop floor.
Four minutes. That is all it took. Larry Conklin, owner of the Trisport bike shop in Junglinster, had his alarm triggered at 3.33am on Monday night. All of the shop's movement detectors went off and it was clear to Conklin that something really has happened. By 3.37am, the thieves were gone. "Even the best police can't be there that fast," he told RTL on Monday afternoon. The security company was contacted within seconds and dispatched to the scene immediately, with police informed at the same time. Conklin and his family live nearby, but even they could not have arrived in time. The thieves had calculated their window to the minute.
In total, 23 bikes were taken. Conklin described it as a rather unusual raid, with the thieves grabbing whatever they could quickly, not necessarily the most obvious targets. Among the items stolen were bikes from a small Paris-Roubaix exhibition the shop had been displaying, including three that belonged to Tom Boonen, one of which he had actually raced on. "It's broken, we just had it on display," Conklin said. "They stole that too." Alongside the memorabilia, a number of genuinely high-value items were also taken.
Conklin wants to alert other bike shops to the threat, though he admits he is not sure what he could have done differently. This is not the first time Trisport has been targeted. Several bikes were stolen in a previous break-in a few years ago, and on New Year's Eve last year, another group of would-be thieves attempted their luck but became stuck when their van got wedged on the ramp outside the shop, leaving empty-handed.
The shop announced on Facebook that it would do everything possible to reopen on Tuesday.
