After reporting theft of his winning Tour de France-bike, Egan Bernal admits to staging the whole ordeal

We are unfortunately seeing it more and more in cycling and so, unfortunately, the theft of bikes is no longer an unknown phenomenon in the peloton. This year, for example, Visma | Lease a Bike, TotalEnergies and Cofidis were victims of large-scale theft, while a sad story is now also coming through from Colombia. There, Egan Bernal reported the theft of his winning Tour de France-bike, but not everything is as it seems.

We have to go back in time more than six years, but those who think of the last Tour de France before the COVID pandemic remember Bernal being the winner of the Tour in 2019. From that Tour de France, the Bogotá-born climber kept a nice memory, namely a yellow bike on which he finished the 21st stage of the Tour on the Champs-Élysées. That very two-wheeler was allegedly stolen in a theft.

Bernal sent a video to, Diego Rueda, a Colombian journalist from Radio Caracol. "We received this video from our champion Egan Bernal, who reports the disappearance of his yellow bike, the bike on which he won the Tour de France," the journalist reported on X.

With that, there are actually far more victims than Bernal himself. "It's a work of art that symbolizes the glory of Cundinamarca (a neighborhood in Bogotá, ed.) and the pride of an entire country," Rueda reveals. "They are trying to find out where the bicycle is."

In the video itself, Bernal announces the loss of his Pinarello Dogma F12, on which he won his first and until today only Tour de France. "I have to tell you something: my bike has disappeared. We are checking the security cameras to find out what happened so that the situation can be clarified quickly. We will keep you informed," said the former Tour winner.

The whole of Colombia was in uproar over the supposed injustice, and plenty of people kept their eyes open for the yellow Pinarello. But in the weeks following the incident, Egan Bernal stayed completely silent—no updates, no hints, nothing. And now it turns out the bike was never stolen at all. The Colombian rider staged the entire thing as a promotion for his own cycling festival.

The event is called the Gran Fondo Egan. In Zipaquirá, a large setup awaited visitors, complete with a full music stage. But the heart of the event was the cycling museum, packed with memorabilia and, of course, Bernal’s life story. And what was standing there in plain view, gleaming under the spotlights? Exactly—the yellow Pinarello. It was all just a joke, as it turns out. Though perhaps not a particularly well-executed one, as many people were genuinely worried.