This article was published after stage 16 of the Vuelta a España 2025.

An oft-repeated claim is that sport and politics don’t mix. In this simplistic assertion, ‘politics’ is usually used to refer to real world issues, anything that is perceived to happen outside the bubble of professional sports. However, cycling, more than any other sport, cannot be separated from the real world and its events — it is a sport that is carried out by the will of the people in the areas it passes through. Furthermore, the Vuelta a España isn’t the Ronde van Vlaanderen or Paris-Roubaix, races confined to the same roads every year, steeped in cycling history. Apart from the usual summits that are visited every few editions like the Angliru, each year the Vuelta is played out on the roads of different regions, passing houses, their gardens, schools and highstreet shops. Passing by, and through, peoples’ lives. 

The politicians and administrators work with the race organisers to bring bike races to their corner of the world, to their people. When the team buses pull away, the barricades are removed, the litter picked up, the villages, towns and cities go back to normality. Perhaps more so than any other stage of this year’s race, stage 16 in Galicia felt very local — the peloton navigated through narrow country lanes, farms and villages. For one day an area is transformed into an arena for elite sport, where some of the most talented athletes in the world riding on the fanciest equipment available, race up and down climbs. 

But that’s not what the land and the communities that live on it are — the hills, the hamlets, the towns, the forests are not stadia. They are part of people’s lives. The sport is just passing through them.

So, cycling here at the Vuelta or at any bike race, is not just sport – it is not separable from the real world and its people. And similarly what is happening in Gaza is not just politics — it is one of the most prominent issues in the world. 

Across towns and cities, protest movements have surged across Europe aiming to pressure governments, stir public awareness, and demand ceasefire. On the same day Israel bombed targets in the Qatari capital of Doha, the second stage of this year’s Vuelta was cut short due to pro-Palestine protestors at the finish town of Mos, Galicia.

Egan Bernal took the win across a makeshift finish line 8km from the planned finish. As this is one of the least populous regions of Spain, the Vuelta organisers can only expect that there will be further disruptions. The climax teeters on a knife’s edge as the race nears its end. And now the question lingers: could demonstrations put an end to the Vuelta’s finish in the Spanish capital? Or even sooner?

You’d be hard pressed to find a race organiser more attuned to complexity than the Vuelta’s. Their playbook in recent decades has been challenged and forced to be adaptable: rerouting stages around wildfire zones, liaising with local authorities after flash floods, reshaping the race in the name of rider safety.

The protests have demanded the same kind of adaptability — but perhaps with greater delicacy. So far the police have experience in channelling protests, cordoning off routes without extinguishing their democratic right to demonstrate. Rider safety has been taken very seriously too, but despite this there have been incidents where riders have crashed due to protestors on the road. 

Race organisers are accustomed to rewriting stage routes, even using chalk to draw finish lines at the last moment, delivering sport while respecting the realities that protesters have a right to be there. Calls — from inside and outside the peloton — for Israel Premier-Tech to be taken out of the race have, so far, not resulted in the team leaving the Grand Tour. The UCI can make that call but have not done so. It may come down to Israel Premier-Tech deciding to take themselves out of the race, but this hasn’t happened yet. Many riders in the bunch, including the red jersey Jonas Vingegaard have acknowledged the complexities of the situation and have understood the point of view of the protesters. 

So what could the next five stages look like? More of the same can be expected. The summit finishes may have to finish at the feet of climbs if police cannot guarantee the safety of the riders on the ascents. The final stage in Madrid could be cancelled altogether or rerouted — there is no amount of police presence that could guarantee safety in such a city. 

The organisers could look into making two finish zones, with more infrastructure than the last two shortened stages (stage 11 and 16) at the designated new finish line. However, they would then have to expect the protests to move there too. Even the individual time trial on stage 18 would be hard to police, perhaps an entirely closed circuit could be drawn up for the time trial. 

The organisers could even upend the final mountainous stages and draw up a few mountain TTs, closed off from the public, like during the Covid-19 pandemic. It has been done before, even if it has been in very different circumstances.

It’s a complicated situation and unprecedented at this extent. It has shown that sport and politics — or rather life — do mix, there is not one without the other, because cycling moves through the world — not above it.