Rabbit Holes: A stolen bike's journey home
Spin Cycle
Escape Collective
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 March 2026
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Iain buys a stolen bike on Facebook Marketplace, with a plan to return it to its owner. But his good act takes an ominous turn when he meets the seller, an erratic man with a troubled past and a head full of conspiracies and violence.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You should write about my life, the bike thief said, as we rode under the freeway, |
| 0:08.6 | trucks roaring above us. |
| 0:10.7 | Maybe I will, I replied. |
| 0:13.5 | I'd gone in trying to get a stolen bike back to its owner. |
| 0:17.3 | But now, I realized, I was in over my head. |
| 0:21.0 | The path was empty. |
| 0:22.9 | There were no pedestrians, no other cyclists. |
| 0:25.6 | Just the two of us next to a muddy creek with trolleys in it, |
| 0:28.8 | and concrete pillars tagged with old graffiti. |
| 0:33.3 | As he hung off my back wheel, I wondered what a bullet would feel like. |
| 0:37.9 | Whether you hear it before it hits you. |
| 0:40.4 | Whether it was worth it for a story about someone else's stolen bike. |
| 0:49.7 | Hello and welcome to Rabbit Holes, a podcast from Escape Collective. |
| 0:53.4 | I'm your host, Ian Trelaw. |
| 0:55.8 | Each episode of this podcast takes a deep dive into a story from somewhere in the world of cycling, |
| 1:01.3 | and this one is a bit of a hair-raising one. I went a little bit gonzo journalist exploring |
| 1:07.3 | the bike theft economy and tried to get a stolen bike back to its rightful owner. |
| 1:12.7 | In the process, I bought some hot goods and I went for a bike ride with a criminal |
| 1:17.0 | and found myself in a pretty dicey situation. |
| 1:21.3 | This is the story of one stolen bike's journey home. |
| 1:42.0 | Chapter 1. The Psychic Wound A couple of years ago, I walked out of a bar and found my bike had been stolen. |
| 1:49.0 | There were a few phases of grief that I went through in the aftermath. |
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