Around 4:00 am this morning two people broke into the warehouse and offices of Chris King Precision Components in the northwest industrial area and made off with a custom ENVE road bike. It took them only a few minutes to come and go —as if they knew exactly what they wanted and where to find it.
According to Chris King Marketing Manager Jay Sycip, it appears to have been a repeat job by the same individuals who broke in and stole two other valuable show bikes two weeks ago.
Chris King is a highly respected company in the bicycle business that started making durable, after-market headsets in 1976. The company’s founder and namesake, Chris King, is in the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame.
All three bikes are still missing. They are one-of-a-kind and outfitted with prototype parts.
Below are the details on all three bikes, including serial numbers and a few close-up photos:
Moots Vamoots Ti CRD prototype with serial number #T4864, AeroSet headset, and Chris King ARD44 carbon wheelset.
Cielo (one off) gravel/drop bar MTB built for 2017 Salt Lake City North American Handmade Bicycle Show. Color is Matte Poppy / Bourbon. Size large. Serial #1601944.
ENVE custom carbon T2 aero all-road bike (one off) serial number unknown for now. Built for Chris King to celebrate the co-development of the new AeroSet headset. We are working with ENVE for more info.
Please keep your eyes peeled and call the Police non-emergency line 503-823-3333 and/or contact Chris King at info@chrisking.com or 503-972-4050 if you have any information.
Thanks for reading.
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This just pains me, as Chris King and his staff have always been excellent hosts when they open up their factory for tours and other bike events; in my experience.
I hope these two fools (+ their fence & buyers) actions do not impact future such events AND that they promptly get remanded to the worst kind of “bike thief purgatory” and forever rot.
Terrible. I’ll keep an eye out. Not easy being a small business owner in Portland.
Yes, and despite the price of some gear there are NO fat cats in this industry!
The deleterious effects of…
So sad. The thieves are going to have to ruin them to get anything out of them. They’re so prominent that they’ll never be able to sell them without suspect. A precious bike for a weeks worth of fentanyl. This city….
Getting harder and harder to live here. No balance, no pragmatism in government. We can’t crack down or enforce laws because of “reasons” so, we’ll just sit on our hands and hope that things magically get better.
It’s just a bike theft but it is emblematic of what this city has become.
I hope those bikes aren’t on a truck heading south, but I fear they are.
^^ this, sadly
I understand posting this story, but at the same time, doesn’t every stolen bike deserve a news blast? Chris King can afford the loss much more easily than the average victim of bike theft.
Plus the bikes are probably insured. My guess is they were stolen as pieces of art rather than for parts, for a totally different type of receiver of stolen goods.
Oh here we go with the “they got insurance, they can afford it” non-sense. Many of the small businesses in this city are being put out of business because of insurance costs. Not saying King is small business but they still don’t deserve this.
David lives in NC. Unfortunately it’s easy to be a minimizer of criminal activity in Portland if you aren’t a potential victim. I’m also so tired of the frequently heard “it’s only property” and “they’re insured” excuses. As you state it’s become both difficult and increasingly expensive for small businesses to obtain/afford insurance in Portland.
Even at distance, David has more interesting stuff to say about Portland’s bike scene than some others.
This thing is appalling because it means a Portland business is likely to be less open to the community. It probably doesn’t affect their viability as a going concern. They may choose not to file a claim to avoid creating a history.
Whoever stole the bikes has been inside CK before. There must be some interesting video of these events.
Chris King does not sell bikes – they are not a local “small-time bike dealer” – they are a significantly-sized company that makes and sells parts worldwide, usually to bike shops and bike manufacturers, though they do some online retail as well. They are likely required to have hefty insurance for all kinds of things. Likely this theft was an “inside job” or maybe by someone who has hacked the security cameras, since they knew exactly where to find what they were looking for, so it’s not likely to be your usual meth-addicted bike thief from the street.
Since Chris King is a manufacturer, don’t you think it odd that the thieves would take bikes and not, for example, pallets of hubs, which are far easier to fence? So that’s why I’m thinking it was an art heist and not your usual run-of-the-mill small-business theft.
And yes, I do happen to live in NC, in a community that has a lot of theft in certain parts of town, just not so much of bicycles.
So David are you saying because you think Chris King is not a small business it’s okay to minimize the theft as they are insured? That’s what it sounds like. What’s the next logical step in this progression? Stealing from Walmart is okay because they’re a giant business? (PS Do you still have Walmart in Greensboro? Walmart decided to bail out of Portland).
I don’t think he is minimizing or justifying the theft.
We have around 7 Walmarts in Greensboro, including 4 Walmart Neighborhood Markets (smaller Walmarts with food but no clothing), all of them thriving. We also have Target. On the other hand we don’t have Fred Meyer, which I suspect is the main reason for Walmart leaving Portland – they don’t like the competition. Our main food stores are Belgian-owned Food Lion and something called Harris Teeter, which is owned by Krogers, the same company that owns Fred Meyer and Quality Foods in Portland. We also have Wholefoods, Lidl, Trader Joe’s, Aldi, Piggly Wiggly and the other usual national chains, but the nearest Safeway is in Washington DC. No Food Outlets nor WINCO, which I miss.
About 20% of of our local population are immigrants, refugees, and foreign workers, so we have an unusually large number of stores that cater to their needs – Indian, Asian, and European grocery stores, plus restaurants to match, compared to most other NC cities.
When I lived in East Portland 2008-15, there was a Safeway on outer Division near 162nd that went out of business because the workers there were illegally selling off store merchandise online – no matter who got fired, their replacements were all known to each other and the store owners realized that the scam would go on as long as the store was open – it was essentially an “inside mafia” of local employees running it. I wonder, did those same employees move on to the Walmart?
David didn’t say anything about this being deserved, just that because the bikes were likely ensured, it is likely less of a financial burden for Chris King than a normal everyday bike owner. Of course the cost of these Chris King boutique bikes is also orders of magnitude higher than your average bike.
Minimizing the impact of a theft on a business by discussing now they have insurance is just not helpful. Even if they are partially restored financially there are still negative impacts. A theft can cause businesses interruptions, be time intensive for owner/staff, increased security costs, deductible costs, create psychological fear for those in the workplace, etc.
This was a high-end art theft, like robbing an art museum rather than stealing a bike from your back yard, by thieves who knew full well what they were doing and have clearly planned in advance how to sell their stolen art. Rather than fixate on the blame, might it not be more useful to concentrate on how to catch the thieves as well as prevent yet another repeat of the same crime?
A repeat break-in at the warehouse of one of the most important bike related businesses is news. The fact that the thieves made off with priceless one of a kind prototype bicycles is somewhat incidental.
Yeah, but…this is more like a heist of priceless, one-of-a-kind artwork and less like a case of a missing newspaper.
That’s a terrible analogy. A missing newspaper is (or was; does anybody still get those delivered?) a nuisance. Whereas a stolen bicycle (from an average person, not a multimillion dollar corporation) can threaten somebody’s livelihood or education.
I would encourage you to watch Ladri di Biciclette for some perspective.
Ohh will be watching up here Wa. This happened to Specialized, idiots tried to sell 15k-20k bikes for 1k and rare machines. They were caught in 48hrs.
Chris King #1 in components, and epic customer service and parts, love them.