‘Today Spain shines as an example and as a source of pride. It’s [giving] an example to the international community by taking a step forward in defence of human rights.’ So said Spain’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez on Sunday, in praise of the pro-Palestine mob that brought the Vuelta a España cycle race to a premature end in Madrid. Sanchez’s support for these disruptive protests came a week after his promise to ‘consolidate in law’ a ban on Spain purchasing Israeli military equipment, in reaction to what he calls Israel’s ‘genocide’ in Gaza.
Cyclists on the Vuelta still had several circuits of the Spanish capital to complete that afternoon, totalling around 60 kilometres. Protesters broke down barriers, however, and occupied the course in the centre of the city, forcing the cancellation of the final stage. There was no podium ceremony, either. The race’s Danish winner, two-time Tour de France champion Jonas Vingegaard, felt robbed of a hard-won celebration. ‘It’s a pity that such a moment of eternity was taken from us’, he said.
Around 100,000 people are thought to have participated in the demonstration, many of them chanting ‘Palestine won this Vuelta’ (note the boundless arrogance of the assumption that Palestinians would have been proud of them for ruining an international sporting event in their name). Two people were arrested and 22 police officers were injured, according to government sources.
Sánchez is seriously at fault for his remarks over the Vuelta farce
Sánchez is seriously at fault for his remarks over the Vuelta farce. First for announcing that he had deep respect for ‘a Spanish society that mobilises against injustice and defends its ideas in a peaceful manner’. A peaceful protest is not one in which over twenty police officers are injured. It is beside the point that no one was seriously hurt or killed, or that the heaviest things thrown at police were water bottles – although that alone qualifies it as non-peaceful. Any protest that wrecks a major sporting event cannot be called peaceful.
It was left to the Vuelta’s organiser, Javier Guillén, to provide the condemnation that should have come from Sánchez. ‘What happened yesterday [in Madrid] was absolutely unacceptable,’ he said yesterday. ‘I regret the image it gave and it should not be repeated.’ Spain’s Conservative leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo adopted a similar stance, saying:
I defend freedom of expression, so long as it doesn’t involve violence or riots. The government has allowed the non-completion of La Vuelta and thus, an international embarrassment that was televised around the world.
Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar posted on X that Sánchez had ‘encouraged protestors to take to the streets’ and that he was a ‘disgrace’ to Spain.
Sanchez’s claim that Sunday’s Vuelta demonstration was peaceful was bad enough, but his apportioning of blame for the aborted race was much more egregious. Rather than pointing to moronic, self-obsessed protestors, he blamed the Israel-Premier Tech cycling team, which has been repeatedly targeted by pro-Palestine agitators throughout the race, resulting in the shortening of several stages due to safety concerns. ‘I think sports organisations need to ask themselves whether it’s ethical for Israel to keep taking part in international competitions,’ Sanchez said. Hardly a surprising announcement from a leader who has also called for Israeli singers to be banned from the Eurovision song contest – a pointless move that has so far been resisted by the event’s organisers.
It is a sad irony that the politicians who shout most loudly about inclusivity also support the toxic politicisation of artistic and sporting events and the discrimination in which that inevitably results. Unlike economic sanctions, sporting and cultural bans do not reduce a state’s capacity for war. They merely discriminate against people on the basis of nationality and aim to justify that discrimination with lofty political ideals. Wimbledon’s exclusion of Russian and Belarusian players from the tennis tournament in 2022 was utterly misguided for the same reason. This year’s bull-running fiesta in the northern Spanish city of Pamplona, as well as the 2025 edition of Glastonbury, were also tainted by deranged displays of prejudice, in both cases against Jews.
Sánchez implies that it would be ‘ethical’ for sporting organisations to exclude participants from major events because they are Israeli. That strikes me as straightforwardly unethical. It is further proof of the warped perspective of a prime minister who is so obsessed with appearing pro-Palestine that he seems no longer able to identify anti-Semitism or sheer stupidity. Of a prime minister who looked at events in Madrid on Sunday and decided that the people who need to reflect are not the virtue-signalling idiots who engaged in a destructive protest but the cyclists who felt unsafe on the roads of Spain, and the supposedly immoral organisers who allowed Israel to participate.
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