The Olympic cyclist Mark Cavendish was beaten up and threatened with a knife by burglars days after he had returned home from intensive care.
The intruders, who wore balaclavas and carried knives, made off with two Richard Mille watches, worth a total of £700,000, and a safe from his home in Ongar, Essex.
The robbery occurred shortly after Cavendish, who has won 34 Tour de France stages, was discharged from hospital after a crash in Belgium in which he broke two ribs and suffered a collapsed lung.
At Chelmsford crown court Romario Henry, 31, and Oludewa Okorosobo, 28, denied robbery.
Cavendish, 37, and his wife, Peta, 36, were in bed with their three-year-old child when they were woken by a noise early on November 27, 2021.
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Edward Renvoize, prosecuting, said that Cavendish thought the noise was “male voices and people walking around the house”. He said that Peta Cavendish, a former model, went to investigate. “She was next aware of figures of people running towards her,” he said. “She ran back up the stairs shouting for her husband to get back into the bedroom.”
In the bedroom Mark Cavendish looked for a panic alarm but two burglars “jumped on him, began punching him and telling him to turn the alarm off,” Renvoize said. “One produced a knife and threatened to stab him up in front of his children. At this point there were three in the room and they began asking where the watches were.”
After Mark Cavendish failed to open a safe in the room because its battery “appeared to have gone dead” he told the robbers that there was “nothing in it anyway as the couple had been burgled the year before and everything had been taken”.
“Mrs Cavendish during this time was looking after her three-year-old child,” Renvoize said. “She was keeping her three-year-old son under the duvet to prevent him seeing the ordeal.”
Peta Cavendish tried to call the police but the intruder grabbed the phone. The assailants then took all phones in the bedroom. Renvoize said that she was “asked for the watch” and her husband “pointed to his watch on the windowsill”, a Richard Mille watch valued at £400,000, to which the intruders said: “That’s not it.” They ordered the gates to be opened and left with the phones, watches, a suitcase and a safe.
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Renvoize said that Peta Cavendish’s phone was found outside, and the “misplacing of that telephone by one of the robbers” was an “error in what was a carefully planned and executed robbery”. It had the DNA of Ali Sesay, 28, who has pleaded guilty to robbery. The police “were able to identify a number of other individuals who appeared to have been in communication with a telephone belonging to Mr Sesay”.
He will be sentenced when the trial of Henry and Okorosobo concludes.
