UPDATE: Extinction Rebellion Toulouse has claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s protest at the sprint finish of stage 11 of the Tour de France, confirming that one of its activists entered the finishing straight wearing T-shirts bearing the slogan “Israel out of the Tour,” “Stop Genocide,” and “Free Gaza,” while waving Palestinian flags and keffiyeh.
The group said the action was carried out “to denounce Tour de France’s complicity in the genocide” and accused the race of “helping restore the image of the Israeli colonial regime” by allowing Israel-Premier Tech to participate.
XR Toulouse also criticised the team’s billionaire owner Sylvan Adams, a vocal supporter of Israel, claiming that Israel-Premier Tech was created with the aim of “bleaching the image of the Israeli colonial regime.”
“Neutrality does not exist. Not acting in a situation of oppression is like taking the side of the oppressor,” the group said in a statement.
It also criticised Toulouse City Hall, accusing it of having an “unwavering support for the Israeli regime” and highlighting its twinning with Tel Aviv, links to arms manufacturer Thalès, and the banning of a Doctors Without Borders Gaza exhibition — which later went ahead in July at Matabiau station.
In response, Israel-Premier Tech said it “respects everyone’s right to free speech” but “absolutely condemns any protests or actions of individuals that interfere with racing at the Tour de France or threaten the safety of the peloton.”
The team added: “We continue to work closely with race organisers and relevant parties to ensure that any protests do not jeopardise team members’ safety, nor impact racing, or our right to participate.”
Original story follows:
Stage eleven of the Tour de France exploded into late drama when a protester carrying an anti-Israel message stormed onto the finishing straight — moments after UAE Team Emirates’ Tadej Pogačar crashed with four kilometres to go in an unrelated incident.
The protester, wearing a T-shirt reading “Israel out of the Tour”, in protest against the participation of Israel-Premier Tech in the Tour de France and at the state of Israel itself, entered the final metres of the stage in Toulouse as Uno-X Mobility’s Jonas Abrahamsen and Jayco-Alula’s Mauro Schmid were sprinting for victory.
A race organiser tackled the protester into the barriers before he could reach the riders. road.cc can confirm that the protester was detained by French police and taken away from the finish area.
A woman in the crowd near the spot where the protester was tackled was also seriously injured. She was seen lying on the ground and receiving treatment from paramedics for an extended period. The injury is understood to have occurred during the same incident.
After a 155km breakaway, Jonas Abrahamsen wins stage 11 ??
Après 155km d’échappée, Jonas Abrahamsen remporte l’étape 11 ?#TDF2025 pic.twitter.com/0jJ3qX0JSE
— Tour de France™ (@LeTour) July 16, 2025
Meanwhile, Pogačar had come down alongside a Uno-X Mobility rider on a straight section of road with around four kilometres remaining. The crash was not serious — the world champion instantly remounted — but it happened just outside the three-kilometre safety zone, meaning he risked losing time.
But in a gracious move, the general classification group, including Visma-Lease a Bike’s Jonas Vingegaard, chose to wait for Pogačar, neutralising the racing among the GC contenders.
? @TamauPogi has crashed but the group of other favorites is waiting for him.
? @TamauPogi a chuté mais le groupe des autres favoris l’attend.#TDF2025 pic.twitter.com/wfrc5t6bLI
— Tour de France™ (@LeTour) July 16, 2025
Up front, Schmid and Abrahamsen still held a slender lead with two kilometres remaining, but Alpecin-Deceuninck’s Mathieu van der Poel was closing fast, the gap down to eight seconds.
In the end, it was Abrahamsen who launched his sprint and powered across the line in Toulouse to take his first Tour de France stage win for Uno-X Mobility. Schmid settled for second place, while Van der Poel crossed the line seven seconds back in third. Lotto-Dstny’s Arnaud De Lie and Visma-Lease a Bike’s Wout van Aert followed at 53 seconds.
The chaotic finale came at the end of a 156.8-kilometre stage that took the riders on a loop from Toulouse and back. Featuring five categorised climbs and a series of aggressive breakaway attempts, the stage was expected either to favour a long-range escape or end in a reduced sprint.
A breakaway featuring Jonas Abrahamsen and Mauro Schmid escaped late on, holding off a fast-closing Mathieu van der Poel in the final kilometres. As Van der Poel chased behind, Abrahamsen launched his sprint and claimed his first Tour de France stage win. Schmid took second, Van der Poel finished third at seven seconds, while Arnaud De Lie and Wout van Aert followed over 50 seconds later.
The general classification riders, including UAE Team Emirates’ Tadej Pogačar, crossed the line together three minutes and 28 seconds behind the stage winner. Ben Healy of EF Education–EasyPost retains the yellow jersey after stage eleven, with a 29-second lead over Pogačar. Remco Evenepoel is third overall at 1:29, with Vingegaard in fourth.
The peloton now heads into the high mountains tomorrow with a summit finish on Hautacam in stage twelve. And while Pogačar avoided losing time today, it remains to be seen whether his crash will have any lasting impact as the Tour reaches its toughest terrain.
Today’s protest is the latest in a growing series of direct actions targeting Israel-Premier Tech at international cycling events. The team has been accused by campaigners of sportswashing — using professional sport to deflect from Israel’s actions in Palestine.
In March 2024, Israel-Premier Tech confirmed it had removed the word Israel from its team vehicles following security advice, though it insisted it remained proud to race under the Israel–Premier Tech name.
Then at the Tour of Britain, pro-Palestinian activists confronted team staff and staged protests at several stages, accusing the team of sportswashing and demanding its exclusion.
In January this year, protests were held at the Tour Down Under in Australia, with campaigners calling for the team to be banned from competition under the slogan “No sport with apartheid.”
The team’s critics have pointed to its links with the Israeli state and highlighted incidents such as Chris Froome appearing in a video produced by Israel’s Foreign Ministry promoting a solidarity ride for Israeli hostages, claiming the team’s high-profile presence deflects attention from Israel’s occupation of West Bank and the genocide unfolding in Gaza, as described by human rights organisation Amnesty International and considered “plausible” by the International Court of Justice.
30 thoughts on “Extinction Rebellion protester disrupts Tour de France sprint finish wearing “Israel out of the Tour” shirt”
Quote:
War?
Fair point, it’s actually
Fair point, it’s actually slaughter.
“The Israeli government’s
“The Israeli government’s repeated war crimes in Gaza”?
Anyone who uses the term ‘war
Anyone who uses the term ‘war’ or ‘conflict’ to describe what is going on in Gaza is a genocide denier.
This headline makes it sound
This headline makes it sound like the protestor made Pogačar crash — which is clearly untrue.
I don’t think the protestor was trying to reach the riders. You can clearly see he opts to run straight instead of towards them.
I’m not defending his actions, but this write-up has some very odd phrasing choices.
“Sports are like the reward of a functioning society” — and I’d argue a “functioning society” would not let Israel’s heinous actions continue as they have been.
Now updated, but yes –
Now updated, but yes – “something something as something something else” really irritates me as a headline – “hurricane in Oklahoma as butterfly flaps wings in Kyoto”.
A functioning society would
A functioning society would have a workable solution to a population that continues to have ~90% public support for the worldwide extermination of Jews and supports leaders who continue to pledge repeats of the October 7th massacre.
But it doesn’t.
open_roads wrote:
Source?
And how many Palestinians
And how many Palestinians have been killed for every Israeli citizen killed on October 7th? That is, as they say, some Old Testament sh1t right there…
(edited)
brooksby wrote:
I believe that’s not the case but can’t point to a source ATM – IIRC read this on the Beeb. The raid by Hamas and others does seem to have been done with the intention of killing *everyone* they encountered. Certainly the footage (horrible to watch) from eg. security cameras shows anyone moving / driving simply being shot, initially from ambush / without warning. Nobody’s asked “who are you?”
And it seems that some of the attackers had determined to continue killing until they were killed.
Exceptions were some abducting and IIRC a couple of isolated occurrences (I believe one case of hostages taken but then dumped before returning to Gaza).
OTOH while I also can’t recall a source for this as stated Israeli government policy I believe the idea of “many eyes for an eye” is not new there (discourage further attacks by ensuring a LOT more of your side suffer than ours).
Also worth noting that the
Also worth noting that the attackers loaded themselves up with various drugs to enable each fighter to rape multiple women and girls.
The specific of these sex attacks are far too unpleasant to post here save to say some of the victims died in the process.
And all of this was captured and live streamed in body worn cameras in a final act of humiliation to the victims – many of whom weren’t Israeli or Jewish.
open_roads wrote:
Going to have to ask for a source for that claim, never heard it and I can’t find a single reference online. Are you referring to the discredited claims by unnamed US and Israeli sources that the Hamas murderers were high on Captagon? That’s a claim for which virtually no evidence has been produced and which experts have said is highly unlikely (it has long been claimed that Islamic terrorists were using Captagon but such claims have been similarly discredited). The October 7 attacks were appallingly brutal and there undoubtedly were multiple instances of rape involved; they were so appalling that there’s no need to add false claims to make them seem worse, they couldn’t be any worse.
open_roads wrote:
WTAF, are you for real or an IDF bot?
Imagine finding a short break
Imagine finding a short break-out point from your concentration camp. I am not sure but if I had been in the Warsaw Ghetto I hope I would have joined in and tried to resist my terrible imprisonment. What would you have done? Just succumbed to the Nazi forces, or actively snitched on your Jewish neighbours?
No rape was “captured”. There were no “rape drugs”. There are so many Israeli propaganda reports of sexual attacks, but where is your actual evidence? Israel strictly controls every drug that enters Palestine. Give me more than the one example, beyond the woman in the back of a vehicle, where there is no evidence she was a rape victim. I can give you more than 50,000 examples of barbaric retribution by Israel against unarmed civilians, Israel soldiers raping in prison etc. And the 75 years of Israeli murder of Palestinians, since Balfour gave Palestinian land away so brutally. Happy to discuss this.
Apparently Hamas managed to get into Israel in a targetted project to capture Israeli soldiers working along the border patrol for hostage purposes, to exchange for the 10,000+ Palestinian prisoners lingering and dying in Israeli jails, usually without charge or conviction. This included thousands of men, women and children (!) imprisoned without any trial.
Israel allowed the breach to happen, despite the border being the most surveilled border in the world. After Hamas breached the border eerily easily, with hand-made drones and windsurf equipment, and often wearing flip-flops, other Palestinian concentration camp victims managed to stray through behind them. Also wearing flip-flops, bearing hand-made weapons – or no weapons at all.
The Israeli rave victims on foot and in their vehicles were seemingly killed by lsraeli helicopters and drones with strong US-sourced weapons that could demolish and pulverise a vehicle. None of which Hamas could have possessed. Palestinians have been forbidden the ability to buy any such equipment or to defend themselves for decades.
I really hope that the international legal authorities investigate all of this as soon as possible, and before all our Palestinian brothers and sisters are dead. My ancestors went through this sort of thing and as their descendent I stand with Palestine.
chrisonabike wrote:
*I’m presuming that no Israeli Arabs were killed on October 7th?
— chrisonabike I believe that’s not the case but can’t point to a source ATM – IIRC read this on the Beeb. The raid by Hamas and others does seem to have been done with the intention of killing *everyone* they encountered.— brooksby
OK, I stand corrected.
brooksby wrote:
Thanks – it’s just care about the facts. Unfortunately that’s a minority concern here where everything is disputed. But of course this issue is pretty much the paradigm of “no neutral ground / independent parties” and “who is not with us is against us”.
I found some references FWIW – I think there were indeed other arab Israelis killed also (as well as non-Israelis / non-jews).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clygy18r2jqo
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/29/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-arab-bedouins.html
Another “general plight of bedouin” article: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-12-05/bedouins-beleaguered-both-sides-israel-hamas-war
Much more detail available from sources referenced in e.g. Wikipedia
BTW – By ‘Arab Israelis’ I
BTW – By ‘Arab Israelis’ I think you are mostly referring to residents of Israel who identify as Palestinians. They identify as Palestinian because they are Palestinian. Their country was forcibly occupied by Zionist colonisers in 1948 without their consent. Describing such an occupied people as ‘Israeli’ is a form of misrecognition. They are Palestinians living in ‘Israel’.
The real story here is the
The real story here is the ‘seriously injured’ spectator. What on earth happened?
Blackthorne wrote:
Pure speculation but watching it live the race official tackled the protester pretty hard into the barriers and they both seemed to disappear from view, I’m guessing maybe the barrier collapsed and the poor lady was trapped underneath?
It was only a matter of time.
It was only a matter of time…you can’t have a gifted populace ‘hammering’ the people’s that originally lived on the land having been gifted it in 1956 by the UN. That’s like white Americans suppressing the native Indians on the US…oh that’s what they did 🙄
leedorney wrote:
how far back do we go to figure out who the original habitents were? Messy messy subject blurred by propaganda on all sides.
ErnieC wrote:
how far back do we go to figure out who the original habitents were? Messy messy subject blurred by propaganda on all sides. — leedorney
what is now Israel has had permanent Jewish population for millennia. More arrived as refugees during the early 20th century, so the Jewish population was about 35% in 1946.
Are you sure? Ever since the
Are you sure? Ever since the founding of the Zionist movement, supporters of Zionism have downplayed the fact that historic Palestine had always had a healthy indigenous population. As early as the 19th and early 20th century, Zionists and their supporters repeated the myth widely: “A land without a people, for a people without a land.” While this slogan encouraged Jewish emigration to historic Palestine, it also paved the way for one of the largest dispossessions of an ethnic group in modern history. The vast majority of the Jewish population was recently immigrated and non indigienouus. It was a theft, a colonial project.
Rome73 wrote:
bothe your point and my point can be true at the same time. They are both true.
I should add – the reason we know a fair amount about Jewish populations is that they were measured carefully – in the ottoman period because Jews had to pay a special tax, and during the British mandate period because the brits sought to limit the flow of refugees escaping fascism.
also, the majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi- ie refugees of antisemitic purges from North Africa and the rest of the Middle East in the second half of the 20th century, not European Ashkenasi Jews. Not so much “immigrants” as “refugees “. Anyway, this is somewhat beside the point, which is to say that sports washing is bad.
Thanks for the reminder, I
Thanks for the reminder, I must buy a replacement keffiyeh. Shukran ya Road.cc.
The implication that the
The implication that the official “prevented” the protestor from reaching the riders is just sensationalist journalism. In a three-way sprint between the riders and the protestor, even his own mother would not have put money on the protestor.
He wanted camera time, not tire tracks up his back. Given the lack of any danger, the official’s take down was OTT and resulted in severe injuries to an innocent bystander. I hope someone explains the importance of proportional response.
Van der Poel was about to
Van der Poel was about to arrive a few seconds after and there was a whole pack of other riders about to arrive fifty-odd seconds later, it was clearly imperative that the protester be removed from the course and his threat neutralised as quickly as possible. Just because he didn’t interfere with the front two riders that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have with MVDP or the next bunch if left to his own devices. The official’s takedown was certainly robust but, in the context of needing to clear the course immediately and ensure the protester didn’t get back on it, entirely proportionate. The protester suffered no harm at all as far as one can see from the pictures. As for “resulted in severe injuries to an innocent bystander” that’s pure speculation and having seen a fan video from another angle I can’t see any bystander being injured. I’m not unsympathetic to the protester’s cause, rather the opposite, but in the context of the race and rider safety – not to mention the protester’s own safety, MVDP in your back at 50+ km/h might smart rather – it was a firm response but not disproportionate.
ETA having now seen this video I think it’s quite clear that the official’s action did not cause injury to any spectator.
This is a moderator
This is a moderator announcement: cleanup required in aisle 3.
“Extinction Rebellion
“Extinction Rebellion Toulouse has claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s protest at the sprint finish of stage 11 of the Tour de France.”
I thought they were a climate protest group, but maybe they’re diversifying into other forms of extinction.
I’d wondered that too. Maybe
I’d wondered that too. Maybe Extinction Rebellion in France are a bit more intersectional/inclusive?