The worst-managed Grand Tour in recent cycling history ended in a fittingly ramshackle manner on Sunday, with the final stage of the Vuelta a España canceled due to overwhelming anti-genocide protests, and no official podium ceremony for the riders who had just destroyed their legs for three weeks. Instead Visma put together a makeshift podium composed of three coolers with numbers Sharpied onto them, in front of an official Vuelta banner duct-taped to a van. In a Madrid hotel parking lot, a big Bluetooth speaker pumped out "Eye of the Tiger" as Visma's Jonas Vingegaard ascended the cooler, and the jersey winners doused each other in champagne.
The story of the 2025 Vuelta is not Vingegaard's narrow victory, Tom Pidcock's impressive podium finish, nor Lidl-Trek winning the points jerseys of all three Grand Tours, but rather something happening 2,000 miles away: the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli-Canadian billionaire Sylvan Adams's Israel–Premier Tech squad has been promoting the genocide's perpetrators, the nation of Israel—on Spanish roads, nominally the domain of Spain's people. Protestors calling for the removal of IPT have thronged the roads in Spain since the race entered the country two weeks ago, and despite clear calls from protestors and riders in the peloton to kick IPT out of the race, both IPT and the Union Cycliste International (cycling's governing body) chose instead to hold the line, sacrificing the race in the process.
As the race wound its way toward Madrid, the protests became increasingly disruptive, with protestors running into the road, causing a few crashes, and blocking off the course with downed trees. Stage 18 was originally planned as a 27.2-kilometer individual time trial; organizers cut it in half. Heading into the final weekend, that meant three stages had been shortened because of the protests, with Stage 11 neutralized kilometers away from the finish and Stage 16's finish line moved up to avoid the crowds in Mos–Castro de Herville. The UCI and IPT would have been naive to think that they could defuse the protests by making statements or moving the race around, though they tried.
Madrid was a different story. An estimated 100,000 protestors thronged the Spanish capital; despite the extra 2,000 cops coming in and beating people up, they were unable to stop protestors from appropriating the barricades, blocking the roads off, and forcing the final stage of the Vuelta to end 60 kilometers early, without a winner or a podium ceremony. "I want to condemn what happened in the final kilometer," Vuelta director Javier Guillén said Sunday, the same day a consortium of international doctors detailed 114 instances of Gazan children being killed by single bullets from Israeli snipers. "Now comments are necessary regarding what we saw yesterday; the images speak for themselves. What happened is unacceptable."
Guillén reiterated that the removal of IPT was not a Vuelta decision, but rather a UCI one, though the most interesting thing he said was that he thinks it's fine, in the abstract anyway, that "everyone take advantage of the platform the Vuelta offers to demand whatever they want." He said it in order to make a point about the protestors' tactics being unacceptable, but the quote is more revealing than he probably realizes, drawing a contrast between the aboveboard promotion of the national project inflicting unchecked misery, starvation, and death upon Gaza, and the adversarial registering of dissent against said project. To focus on the lawfulness of the actions instead of the underlying moral framework is to be blinkered into an administrative paralysis, a state of mind that cannot distinguish between people asking rudely for an end to the horrors and the horrors themselves.
That is not how normal people think and feel about these things. There is a major difference of both kind and degree, which no normal person could fail to register, between Javier Romo crashing out of a bike race and 200,000 casualties in Gaza. The idea that IPT has nothing to do with it, the team owned by a famous, committed Zionist activist who is friends with Benjamin Netanyahu and is explicitly using his cycling team to promote the state of Israel, is also ridiculous.
Riders who spoke about the protests said they did not feel safe, a state of affairs that organizers and Adams bear total blame for. Protestors made clear that they would disrupt the race as long as IPT was in it. In response, not only did organizers protect IPT, they continued trying to hold the race as normal, essentially hoping that the optics of a disjointed Vuelta would overcome anti-genocide sentiments. They put the riders in direct danger, hoping they would say This is bad and thus dissuade protestors. It obviously didn't work. Did anybody seriously expect people to be more committed to the smooth operation of a bike race than to their moral opposition to genocide?
"The sports organizations should consider whether it's ethical for Israel to keep participating in international competitions. Why expel Russia after the invasion of Ukraine and not expel Israel after the invasion of Gaza?" Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said. "Until the barbarity ends, neither Russia nor Israel should be in any international competition."
I love bike racing. In most years, I love the Vuelta. Millions of people in Spain and around the world do too. Many of them, including several prominent figures in the sport, have expressed something between bafflement and hostility that protestors are making their voices heard in the supposedly neutral arena of sports. "These days, sport is used as a platform for addressing social issues," said Visma boss Richard Plugge, one of the most influential voices in the peloton. "But the participants must be protected. They must not become victims of this social debate. That debate must be kept out of the athletes’ arena at all times. Athletes must be able to fight their battles unhindered in the stadium, or in our case, on the road. Otherwise, the unifying essence of sport will be jeopardized."
This position both willfully mischaracterizes Adams's sponsorship and promotion of Israel as a neutral fact, and misreads what cycling is. The sport operates and pays for itself on billboard logic; the "platform" that Plugge distinguishes from the racing is in practice a critical part of the racing. Cycling is for the public, not only because races are held on the public's roads, but because it's a show for everyone. And if people don't like their racing being used to whitewash a genocide, it's their right to put a halt to it.
The Vuelta is a big deal. Less than a year from now, the Tour de France is set to start in Barcelona. Protestors have already made clear their intention to disrupt that Tour stage if IPT is once again allowed to participate. IPT and Adams have already shown that they're willing to destroy the least prestigious Grand Tour in order to promote a genocidal aggressor, but the Tour is a significantly bigger deal; the problem of IPT's participation in the sport will scale up with it. The UCI released a poisonous statement on Monday, marking its "total disapproval of and deep concern about" the protests. That same day, the state of Israel killed 51 people in Gaza.
