It’s a sad fact that, if you leave a bicycle unattended and unlocked for a few minutes, chances are that some opportunistic thief will pedal away on your machine and sell it on to a crooked vendor or dodgy customer base. Even if you take the trouble to lock your bike, it still may be stolen if you use a feeble lock or don’t lock it carefully enough. How many times have you seen a single wheel locked to a railing? There is value in bike parts as well as whole bikes.

The demand for electric bicycles is growing, even among die-hard traditional cyclists, so who in the world supplies this demand?

Professional cycling has had to work hard to clean up its image, particularly since Lance Armstrong admitted to taking performance-enhancing drugs during his Tour de France successes. You might argue that the sport hasn’t recovered from that, since a huge amount of cynicism is still observable online and in the press after any extraordinary cycling performance.