Mills and Hartley: Protests, politics and hypocrisy - Israel’s team at the heart of Vuelta turmoil
Key topics
Pro-Palestinian protests disrupt multiple Vuelta stages
Israel Premier Tech alters kit to protect rider safety
Critics highlight hypocrisy of selective outrage in sport
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A combined 184 riders from 23 teams with 575 technical staff, competing in 21 stages over a route of 3,186km, shepherded by more than 3,000 organisers … the Vuelta a España is by any standards both a logistical feat and a sporting spectacle.
Still, a few other select statistics tell the story so far of the 2025 edition. The Vuelta attracts around one million television viewers per stage, with 1,000 on-site journalists feeding the media appetites of 227 million website visitors over the three-week event. And then there is the need for 8,000 security personnel, including 280 police, 60 of whom ride the stages back and forth on their motorbikes.
The security presence has been an unfortunate feature of the 2025 edition.
One of the three Grand Tours of cycling – along with the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France – the Vuelta has been known for its relatively chilled atmosphere and friendly spectators. That is, until this year.
From its entry into Spain through Catalonia from the start, for 2025, in Italy, and up through the mountains of the Pyrenees into the Basque region, the stages have been dominated by the presence of pro-Palestinian protesters, their ire, noise and nuisance aimed at the presence of the Israel Premier Tech (IPT) team. This peaked on Wednesday, 3 September, when the finish of Stage 11 to Bilbao had to be called off three kilometres from the planned end due to the presence of mass protests, and the results neutralised at that point. By then, riders had run the gauntlet of protesters squeezing the path on the first lap of the finish line and negotiating a banner blocking the road on the Alto de Vivero hilltop, in this instance by riding around or under it.
It is tradition that the riders are presented to the crowds just before the start. Each team takes its turn on the stage, the riders and their accomplishments introduced amidst cheering and clapping, with groups of fans obviously favouring one nationality over another. One team is missing from these line-ups – Israel Premier Tech – since to do so would, in the words of one team member, only be “asking for trouble”.
All the pressure is intimidating for the cyclists, professionals trying to do a very difficult job, many of them in their early 20s. The protests have made a very dangerous sport even more so, with three riders so far coming off their bikes after tangling with demonstrators. Simone Petilli, team-mate of South African Louis Meintjies on Intermarché-Wanty, fell after demonstrators ran into the middle of the peloton, while Movistar rider Javier Romo completed Stage 15 with bad scrapes after a heavy fall caused by a pro-Palestinian protester.
Olympic champion Tom Pidcock, who races for Q36.5, a team with South African connections given its origins in Dimension Data/MTN Qhubeka, spoke out against the protests which caused him a likely Stage 11 win, stating that “putting us in danger is not the way forward”.
Share of scrutiny
While Israel merits its share of scrutiny (and blame) for the passage of war and peace in the Middle East, the scale and bullying nature of the protests say at least as much about Spain and Europe as it does about Israel.
Israel Premier Tech was founded as Israel Cycling Academy in 2014, breaking into the big league in 2018 with participation in the Giro. By 2019, it had gained a World Tour licence with the takeover of Katusha-Alpecin, subsequently changing its name to Israel Start-Up Nation. Seven-time Grand Tour winner Chris Froome and South African Tour de France yellow jersey holder Daryl Impey joined the team for 2021. With victories and top-ten finishes on various Grand Tours, the future appeared to hold much promise, though Froome proved a disappointment, unable to come back from a serious crash in 2019.
The team, now known as Israel Premier Tech with the acquisition of a Canadian sponsor, was relegated from Grand Tour status at the end of 2022. Since then, it has relied on invitations to the premier events based on its annual performances.
Protests dogged IPT’s participation at the Tour de France this year, but these have come to a peak during this edition of the Vuelta, with various organisations calling for its exclusion using the argument “Sport without genocide”, accusing the team of “sportswashing” Israel’s image.
The Vuelta organisers responded then in confirming IPT’s right to participate as much as the right of protesters to peacefully demonstrate.
On 27 August, protesters with Palestinian flags and a banner reading “Neutrality is complicity. Boycott Israel” blocked the riders during the Stage 5 time-trial outside Girona in Catalonia, the team losing nearly a minute to the winners. And then the drama of Stage 11, after which time the team decided to ride in a different kit, removing the name of Israel from the kit, “(i)n the interest of prioritising the safety of our riders and the entire peloton, in light of the dangerous nature of some protests at the Vuelta a España”.
“Absurd self-image”
Although the left in Spain rhetorically supports the protests, the strength of the resistance has regional roots. As a result, in the view of some, it is a part of the “absurd self-image” of the Catalan and Basque nationalists as “an oppressed people”, now heavily subsidised and privileged classes that justify their exorbitant privilege in an imaginary past that is never confined to history.
In this regard, they are not too different from the ANC.
The Basque writer Jon Juaristi describes this state of political mind as “the melancholy loop”, or el bucle melancólico, in his 1997 book of the same title, in which he traces the history of Basque nationalism, delving into its ideological and emotional aspects, examining how these narratives contribute to a cyclical pattern of thought and behaviour − hence Basque nationalism’s “melancholy loop” in which there is a permanent return to the “struggle” as if those were the really good ol’ days, hardly reflecting the current freedom and prosperity.
The Palestinian cause represents a springboard to gleefully dive into the melancholy pool, one last time, before sitting down for an excellent lunch with friends, usually courtesy of the taxpayer. The self-imposed moral amnesia, as the historian Tony Judt put it about Stalinists infatuated with communism, of this forgetful generation appears as incomprehensible as it is real.
They operate with none of the caution of Camus: “If there were a party of those who aren’t sure they’re right, I’d belong to it”, but rather along the lines of his observation that “Every wrong idea ends in bloodshed, but it’s always the blood of others.”
It’s a search for meaning now in the causes of others. As George Santayana defined fanaticism: redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
Little wonder that Spanish – as opposed to Catalan or Basque – nationalists have tired of such “spoiled whining brats”, the political behaviour deliberately encouraged by the current government of Pedro Sánchez, dependent as he is on backing from the extremes of the political spectrum to retain his coalition in power. Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party depends on the support from Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), Together for Catalonia (Junts), EH Bildu, the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), the Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG) and Canarian Coalition (CCa).
It’s hard to assemble such a cast, and it’s proving even harder to make it govern.
All manner of hypocrisy
The protests on the Vuelta against Israel may be a relatively peaceful choice to end the war in Gaza. But they represent all manner of hypocrisy, not least since they avoid dealing with inconvenient truths, including how to rationalise those – Hamas and Iran included – who don’t want Israel to exist at all, or the presence in the Vuelta of sponsors of other teams – including the governments of Bahrain, the UAE, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia – who hardly possess stellar human rights records let alone practise democracy. Another irony is that the State of Israel does not even fund the team; the labelling is a preference of its sponsor.
Then again, Israel should be held to a different standard from the brutal recidivistic one commonly associated with the Middle East, shouldn’t it?
*This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission