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Ronde van Spanje: Tumult, Unrest, and Vingegaard Wins
There is one road cycling event which exceeds all others in general notability, Tour de France. This post is not about it, but about its Spanish counterpart, alike in the rules, mechanics, participants.
The 2025 edition of the Tour of Spain has just ended on Sunday, and boy was it memorable. Not for the cycling, but for what spilled over the side of the road, onto the course. Namely: Pro-Palestine protests. The stated cause of these protestors was the participation of the team "Israel - Premier Tech" (IPT), which despite its name, is not owned by Israel, but by a Jewish Canadian. (Israel has not exactly disassociated itself from the team, its PM expressing support to the team for not buckling).
Stage 5 was a Team Time Trial, where instead of all cyclists starting together, each team starts separately at regular intervals. Perfect situation for those targeting some team. Protestors were aware of this, and attacked IPT, whose finishing time would later be reduced by 15 seconds.
In Stage 11, when cyclists were about half an hour from the finish, shortened by 3km, it also was declared it would have no winner.
IPT would change jerseys, replacing "Israel" on them with the Star of David.
Stage 16 was altered, when the race was already on, by reducing its length by 8km.
Stage 18 was an Individual Time Trial, where each cyclist starts separately at set intervals, again perfect if one targets a particular cyclist. Race organizers sensed the danger, and shortened the course from 27.2 km to 12.2 km, the day before the stage.
Stage 21, the final one, was set to end in several circuits around Madrid, but that part was cancelled. The stage would have no winner, nor would it count for the Spanish Yellow aka Red Jersey.
Safety concerns also prevented podium ceremony from taking place. An IPT rider, American Matthew Riccitello becoming the leader in the Youth (or White Jersey) classification in stage 20, thus entitled to participate in the ceremony, probably exacerbated the perceived security situation. (The teams would go on to conduct their own ceremony in some parking lot, with the production value of an amateur race.)
Currently the position of PM of Spain belongs to the Socialist Party, and in the conflict between making his country look competent and his support for Palestine, chose the latter. Explicitly supporting the disruptors, (following the Spanish FM's calls for IPT to abandon the race a bit over a week earlier). The opposition opposed, as did Israel's FM and PM of Denmark.
Incidentally, the team at the center of this controversy on Sunday participated in a Canadian one-day-race, "Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal" under "IPT", instead of the full name. The race went smoothly, and was won by an American Brandon McNulty riding for the state-owned team "UAE Team Emirates - XRG".
Protestors having veto rights over sports participants, is something I oppose. It would be anti-pluralist. It would be like some manifestations cancel culture in being a variant of tortious interference. The audience wants to see the best riders, the best riders want to participate, but a politicized minority wants to come between them.
It reminds of some democrat-tinged critiques of the US political system, in that it has too many veto points, thus changes are hard to enact. It is, however, out of of all institutions the government, for which it makes the most moral sense to be veto-full as it is unique in wielding force against everyone. But such a veto-full system applied to all of society would be undesirable, as another person watching a cyclist riding for a team you do not like, does not make one coerced. This is why one should have less say in it.
EDIT: Cycling's governing body, UCI, has issued a statement. Most damning for Spain is the following paragraph:
If you look at the wars that became horrendous PR failures such as Vietnam, the French in Algeria, South Africa etc they have all been wars against a population that fundamentally has no reason to accept that order. The South Vietnamese government had no real claim of authority or legitimacy. The palestinian population has no reason to accept large number Eastern Europeans who moved there in the 90s having more rights than they do. They have no reason to accept having a country that is chopped in two parts of which the largest part isn't connected to the sea.
Israel is dropping like a rock in the polls and especially among young people. Palestine's best weapon is IDF soldiers with tiktok showing the world their true nature. Israel is not going to be viable as a state when the state is deeply unpopular in the rest of the world.
The completely incompetent looking one was the one who dragged Spain into the Iraq war. Competency is ensuring we don't have a Mediterranean state that creates a massive refugee crisis near Europe. A country that bombs six MENA countries in a week is an enemy of Europe.
Israel destroyed Gaza's catholic church and expects to be treated like a normal country. Does Israel treat countries that destroy synagogues the same way?
The average Gazan's life would improve immensely if they just complied and stopped fucking with Israel. The main thing motivating them is pure zealotry for a system of belief and governance that only somewhat succeeds if coupled with a gigantic Oil windfall.
The best case scenario for independent Palestine is likely Libya or Lebanon. The main humanist crisis here is not achieving the standards of living currently available to peaceful Israeli Arabs
I watched an interesting interview on Tucker Carlson’s podcast not too long ago that offered an alternative perspective of what it’s like for an ordinary person to live under Israeli occupation and also has to live with Palestinians and Hamas.
Israel isn’t helping itself using this conflict to support its ulterior designs for expansion to create a Greater Israel in the region. You can argue who started the fire and draw your lines in the sand wherever you want but to me there’s no doubt Israel is pouring more gasoline on it at the moment than Palestinians are.
After the tidal wave of gasoline that was Oct 7th, I'm not ready to point fingers at Israel for not deescalating.
If you think that qualifies as a tidal wave of gasoline what do you think about the vast numbers of Palestinian hostages? Sure, some of the small children they arrest get charged with crimes, but some of the Oct 7 hostages were "kidnapped from their tank" etc - actively serving in the military. October 7th is a rounding error when compared to what the Israelis were doing to the Palestinians beforehand, and if you want to claim that it justifies what happened next then you unfortunately also have to justify everything the Palestinians have done in revenge.
Which is why they're being treated as POWs, with all the rights involved, right? As opposed to being treated as... well, hostages?
If you feel so strongly about people being taken as hostages, I assume you're aware of the vast numbers of Palestinians that have been kept hostage by Israel as prisoners? If that's your actual objection and you're concerned about violations of international law there's actually a lot of ground to go over with regards to Israeli violations of it. If that's your actual point, I'm more than happy to go over it with you.
But if your point is just who/whom (taking hostages is fine and legal when the Israelis do it but a warcrime when the Palestinians take a tenth of that number) then I'm not really interested in a discussion, or what passes for one when your criteria is just "if it is my side it is good, if it is the other side it is bad".
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