Olympic cyclist Mark Cavendish and his wife were subjected to a knifepoint robbery while at home with their children – with one masked raider threatening to stab the athlete, a court heard.
The intruders made off with two Richard Mille watches, valued at £400,000 and £300,000 respectively, during the raid in the Ongar area of Essex, Chelmsford Crown Court was told.
Cavendish and his wife Peta were in bed with their three-year-old child when they were awoken by noise in the early hours of 27 November 2021, said Edward Renvoize, opening the prosecution case on Tuesday.
He said that Cavendish thought the noise was “male voices and people walking around in the house”.
“Because Mr Cavendish was recovering from a number of injuries at the time it was Mrs Cavendish who got up and went to investigate what they had heard,” Mr Renvoize said.
“Her first thought was perhaps her older son had got up and may have knocked something over downstairs.”
He said Peta heard male voices that appeared to be coming from the kitchen area. “She was next aware of figures of people running towards her,” said the barrister. “She ran back up the stairs shouting for her husband to get back into the bedroom.”
Mr Renvoize said that she got back into the bedroom and Cavendish looked for a “panic alarm that he had”. Mr Renvoize said that some of the raiders “jumped on” Cavendish and “began punching him and telling him to turn the alarm off”.
“One produced a knife and threatened to stab him up in front of his children,” said the prosecutor.
“At this point there were three in the room and they began asking where the watches were. Mrs Cavendish during this time was looking after her three-year-old child,” he said. “She was keeping her three-year-old son under the duvet to prevent him seeing the ordeal in the bedroom.”
The prosecutor said Mrs Cavendish “tried to use her phone to call the police”, but an intruder “grabbed the phone”. He said the phone was found outside the property, and that the “misplacing of that telephone by one of the robbers” was an “error in what was a carefully planned and executed robbery”.
Police had the phone forensically examined and DNA was found that was matched to 28-year-old Ali Sesay, of Rainham, east London.
Mr Renvoize told jurors that Sesay had “pleaded guilty to the offence of robbery already”. He said that police “were able to identify a number of other individuals who appeared to have been in communication with a telephone belonging to Mr Sesay”.
Romario Henry, 31, of Bell Green, Lewisham, southeast London and 28-year-old Oludewa Okorosobo, of Flaxman Road, Camberwell, south London, both deny two counts of robbery and are on trial.
Mr Renvoize told jurors the robbers had “meted out violence to Mark Cavendish”, adding: “It’s quite clear the assailants were interested in obtaining watches and once they got the watches they left the premises with very little else.”
The trial, estimated to last around two weeks, continues.
