Israel-Premier Tech have been barred from this weekend’s Italian one-day classic Giro dell’Emilia over fears pro-Palestine protests could see a repeat of the Vuelta a España, where disruption from demonstrations saw crashes and racing suspended multiple times.
The 110th edition of the prestigious one-day classic takes place on Saturday, the race finishing with its traditional Bologna circuit that takes in multiple ascents of the iconic San Luca climb. Protests over Israel-Premier Tech’s place on the startline were expected, BBC Sport noting the historic capital of the Emilia-Romagna region has a large student population and a long history of left-wing politics.
Last week, pro-Palestine protesters clashed with police in Milan during a nationwide strike called by trade unions against Israel’s actions in Gaza. Further protests were expected at Giro dell’Emilia, pressure growing last week on the race’s organisers which has culminated in race director Adriano Amici announcing that Israel-Premier Tech will be removed from the startlist “for the safety of all athletes, technical staff and spectators”.
The team called the decision “extremely regrettable”, arguing “threats of violence have disrupted our sport”.
“Israel-Premier Tech has been informed that our invitation to the Giro dell’Emilia has been withdrawn,” a spokesperson said. “The organisers have cited security concerns linked to planned protests that threatened to disrupt the race. We find it extremely regrettable that threats of violence have disrupted our sport.”
The pressure is mounting on Israel-Premier Tech, the team’s bike sponsor Factor and title sponsor Premier Tech both going public with their desire for the team to drop ‘Israel’ from the name.
Canadian company Premier Tech said the situation “is no longer sustainable” and it expects “the team will evolve towards a new name that excludes the term Israel, and that it will adopt a new identity and brand image.”
Factor CEO Rob Gitelis went further and raised doubts about whether Israel-Premier Tech will continue to use its bikes next season.
“I’ve already told the team: Without a name change, without a flag change, we won’t continue,” Gitelis said. “It’s not a matter of right or wrong any more. It’s become too controversial around our brand, and my responsibility is to my employees and my shareholders, to give them maximum space with which to grow this company and make it profitable. Adding additional level of conflict or complexity, we just can’t accept that any more.
“It’s no longer a personal thing of I support this or I support that. There’s just a certain level of controversy we just can’t have surrounding the brand.”
Israel-Premier Tech’s presence at the Vuelta sparked widespread protests which grew through the first week and escalated as the race reached the Basque Country. The Bilbao stage was neutralised before the final stage in Madrid was abandoned after protesters stormed the finish circuit, making news headlines around the world.
Throughout the three weeks, numerous crashes were caused by protesters running into the road, riders repeatedly expressing fears for their safety and putting the team under pressure to withdraw to bring an end to the protests.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed support for the team, praising riders and staff for “not giving in to hate and intimidation, while team boss Sylvan Adams said they would “not surrender to terrorists” and will “never ride without the name Israel”.
During the Vuelta the team told us it would not change its name, but did finish the race in kit that omitted mention of Israel.
While Israel-Premier Tech is not officially state-owned, instead funded by Canadian-Israeli billionaire Adams, it has received some funding from Israel’s ministry for tourism and Adams – who attended Donald Trump’s inauguration, encouraged US attacks on Iran in June, and called on Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza – has described the team as “ambassadors” for Israel and a means of promoting a “more realistic vision” of modern Israel.
The Vuelta protests have already raised worries about next year’s Tour de France, which is due to start in Barcelona. Ex-UCI president Brian Cookson suggested that cycling’s governing body should introduce a new rule banning professional teams from featuring nation states in their names.
Barcelona City Council confirmed that it has no plans to cancel next year’s Tour start, though the local authority has made it clear that the Catalan city aims to host the race without a team bearing Israel’s name or flag.
“We want the teams competing under the Israeli flag, in the same way as has happened with Russia, to stop competing under this flag,” sports councillor David Escudé said.
The UCI, however, accused the Spanish government of “exploiting sport for political purposes” by backing the demonstrators’ protests against Israel-Premier Tech’s participation at the Vuelta.
Describing the protesters’ actions as “militant”, the governing body’s statement condemned the “unacceptable and counterproductive” stance taken by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who called for Israel to be banned from all sports events following the cancelled Madrid stage, arguing that the nation should not be permitted to “whitewash” its “barbarism” in Gaza.
“We regret the fact that the Spanish Prime Minister and his government have supported actions that could hinder the smooth running of a sporting competition and, in some cases, expressed their admiration for the demonstrators,” the UCI said.
Doubling down on the statement, UCI president David Lappartient this weekend argued at the World Championships that Israeli athletes are “welcome” at races and “sport is not a tool for punishment”.
In defence of Israel-Premier Tech he said that “if we start excluding one team, next year it will be another, on another issue”.
“The IOC has confirmed our position. We are not a tool for sanctions; we are a tool in the service of an ideal of bringing people together with the unifying power of sport, with the aim of promoting peace. And peace does not come through exclusion,” Lappartient said.
“So yes, Israeli athletes are welcome, just as Palestinian athletes are welcome when we host them at our competitions, just like all athletes from around the world. That is truly the power of the Olympic movement.
“It is perfectly normal for them to be here, because we believe – and I am speaking on behalf of the UCI, but I could almost say that there are also Olympic values – that sport is not a tool for punishment.”
He added: “Look at the Olympic Games in Paris: all countries were present, and although Russian athletes competed under a neutral flag, they were still there. We believe that no athlete should be deprived of the opportunity to participate in a competition.
“This position is contradictory to the Olympic values of unity, mutual respect, and peace. It also calls into question Spain’s ability to host major international sporting events, ensuring that they take place in safe conditions and in accordance with the principles of the Olympic Charter.
“The Russian Olympic Committee is suspended because it has incorporated the four oblasts that belong to Ukraine into its statutes and because Russia attacked Ukraine during the Olympic truce that was unanimously voted for by the United Nations.”
The Giro dell’Emilia represents the beginning of Italy’s end of season one-day classics, all building to the final Monument of the season Il Lombardia. Tadej Pogačar won last year’s edition, Israel-Premier Tech’s Canadian climber Michael Woods finishing fourth.
27 thoughts on “Israel-Premier Tech argue “threats of violence have disrupted our sport” after team removed from major one-day race over protest fears”
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It’s the inclusion of a team like IPT that’s exploiting the sport to sportswash a country’s reputation. Removing the team or removing the nationalistic branding is just correcting that mistake.
Whatever anyone thinks about Israel or its actions, there’s simply no honest way to pretend that a team described by their owner as “ambassadors” who are promoting a particular view of the country isn’t political – it is, just as much as it would be if someone tried to enter a team branded as ‘pro life’ or ‘eat the rich’. The merits of the individual arguments don’t actually matter – if the UCI wants politics out of their events then they need to not let it be used as a platform for politics.
So let’s start by removing
So let’s start by removing UAE, Bahrain Victorious and Jayco Alula.
Just to be clear, what
Just to be clear, what entities can and cannot promote their interests?
Nighttrain123 wrote:
Traditionally commercial entities with a product or brand available to consumers viewers of some relevance to the sport and a willingness to be seen as a supporter of that sporting code. Occasionally not for profit organisations with a public health message consistent with sporting code.
Never political organisations, in the same way that sporting regulators are never supporting one political organisation.
There’s a reason why Socialists for Selotape didn’t catch on….
Correct me if I am wrong, but
Correct me if I am wrong, but all the protests to date, including those at the Vuelta, have been non-violent. Loud, disruptive, but no actual violence.
As stated in the sub-headline
As stated in the sub-headline, at least one of the protests has already led to a crash, causing injuries (albeit only minor ones), and so I would say that already crosses the line into “violence” (not to mention the risk of more serious injury occurring).
Not violent per se, but a
Not violent per se, but a couple of them (stretching a rope in front of a charging peleton; jumping in front of a bunch finish) had the potential to endanger riders (albeit they didn’t cause any actual harm in the event). Very much the exception, though – largely you’re correct.
Cancelled, shortened and
Cancelled, shortened and neutralized stages, it seems race organisers, teams DS and professional riders felt that these non-violent protests brought in potential risks. They made the right decisions by minimizing the competitors exposure to political events.
It wasn’t to minimise
It wasn’t to minimise exposure to ‘political events’ – it was to minimise exposure to compromised course conditions. It would, of course, be stupid to continue the race into a sector where protestors had narrowed the course by shifting the barriers, or were standing on the course, just as it would be to continue it through a rockfall or a flood.
That’s not really the same as ‘threats of violence’, though. Pretty much all* of the impact on the race was achieved without any threats or causing anyone any harm.
[* Doubtless there will have been some threats made on anti-social media – sadly though, that’s the case for pretty much any area of human interaction these days.]
“The Russian Olympic
“The Russian Olympic Committee is suspended because it has incorporated the four oblasts that belong to Ukraine into its statutes and because Russia attacked Ukraine during the Olympic truce that was unanimously voted for by the United Nations.”
What about:
“The Israeli Olympic Committee is suspended because it has annexed more and more of the West Bank in the last year, in direct contravention of the ICJ judgement, etc.”
?
“threats of violence have
“threats of violence have disrupted our sport”
No, it’s your country’s genocide: that’s what is disrupting your sport.
Good, now we just need them
Good, now we just need them to remove UAE, Bahrain Victorious and Jayco Alula.
Isn’t Itamar Einhorn the only
Isn’t Itamar Einhorn the only rider actually from Israel on the Israel-Premiertech team? If so the team is clearly a promotional vehicle for Isreal. …it would be surprising if the whole team roster of riders are not seeking to leave the team.
go and check what atrocities
go and check what atrocities were committed by Isreal in Palestine JUST yesterday. People seeking food massacred, starvation, hospitals attacked, entire families murdered, a market was attacked by a missile – killing dozens including children. That was just yesterday. Israel has been massacring day after day after day after day – for decades. That’s why Israel should be boycotted. No other country in the world is committing a genocide at the scale and cruelty that Israel is.
Israel is a colonial
Israel is a colonial-terrorist entity. It’s “armed forces” were literally formed from a collection of terrorist groups, who came up with the tactic of using truck bombs against civilian targets, and who have committed terrorist attrocities against civilians YEAR AFTER YEAR _ever since_. Including poisoning wells with typhoid!
The core idealogy behind Israel is intrinsically racist. A state that constitutionally elevates one class of people over all other, giving them special rights in law, and even wider special treatment in practice, is NOT a state compatible with modern civilisations.
And that’s setting aside the fact that this also the most oppressive state on the planet. One which subjects almost half the people under its control – i.e., the ~5M Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza – to the most brutal military occupation, with arbitrary detention to torture camps, arbitrary destruction of property, restriction on movement, etc., as part of a long-running campaign of slow, strangulatory, genocide. In Gaza the last 2+ years, is an explicit and intense genocide.
These Palestinians must pay taxes to Israel, must register their births and addresses with Israel, has Israel control all their foreign trade, and yet are denied a vote, denied human rights, and brutally oppressed.
The hasbarists who claim Israel is a democracy are shameless liars.
Israel, in this form, is not a state that should be accepted by any decent human being.
There is plenty of blame on
There is plenty of blame on all sides, but this kind of polemic and distorted history isn’t helpful. Israel is just a state for Jewish people, just like there are native american tribal nations in North America. Just because membership is exclusive doesn’t make it oppressive to anyone else.
Israel has been reluctant to hand Gaza and the West Bank, as a sovereign state, post-1967, to the Palestinians because of the history of the Arabs attacking Israel.
The Arabs had Gaza and the West Bank before 1967, but kept choosing war against Israel.
Post -1967, no nation has endured more terror attacks, particularly during the Second Intifada, which ended with Israel pulling out of Gaza and demolishing several big settlements in the West Bank and evicting the settlers.
Sadly, this resulted in Hamas attacking with even more vigour with rocket attacks most days. Their two-decade campaign of violence culminated in the 7th Oct attacks.
Israel has plenty of blame for the current situation, but it doesn’t just resolve itself with the birth of a Palestinian state. The Arabs need to choose peace themselves.
Nighttrain123 wrote:
I.e., an intrinsically racist, apartheid entity – exactly as I wrote.
Really, you are going to try equate Israel with tribal nations in the USA (which are subject to Federal law). Really now…
When, year after year after year, you steal their land and kill them, in contravention of international law and any morality, then yes that is oppressive. If it is not oppressive, what is?!!
You are conveniently leaving out the fact that it has been the invasive colonial-terrorists who kept attacking and killing.
What nonsense. Israelis have been murdering and stealing since the 1930s, very intensively from the 1940s onward, and have never ever ceased. And you try to paint people defending themselves, trying to prevent their land from being stolen by foreign thieves as “choosing war”! What rubbish.
In which year have more Israelis been killed by Arabs, than Arabs by Israelis?
You’ve been bombing Gaza almost non-stop for decades, before the 2nd intifada. You’ve signed deals in the 90s, and then not honoured them – instead *accelerating* settlement building in the West Bank. Which was one of the great drivers for why the 2nd intifida happened.
Again, you just completely leave out the bit where Israel keeps murdering, keeps stealing, keeps imprisoning and torturing, keeps stealing, stealing stealing. You just leave all that out and then blame others when they try stop your endless theft!
Jews needed a national home because of their history of being oppressed, and that includes in the Islamic world.
A Jewish state oppresses nobody intrinsically, just like a native American tribal nation doesn’t.
Apartheid was a political-legal system by which one group exploited another economically. Unlike white South Africans who needed the Black population to exploit, Israelis don’t want or need anything from the Palestinians.
Palestinians are dying because they won’t stop attacking Israel. UN Resolution 242 doesn’t even say who Israel should hand Gaza and the West Bank to. Before 1967, they were in the possession of Egypt and Jordan, respectively. Israel would be stupid to relinquish all control of these territories without security guarantees, given the history of the conflict. The last thing it needs is a staging ground for a foreign army on its doorstep or an Iranian-backed terror-state. These scenarios are far more likely than a thriving liberal democracy in the Western mould.
The settlers only have leverage because of the intractability of the Palestinians. Every time Israel has given concessions, such as the 2005 unilateral disengagement, the Palestinians have just become more aggressive.
There were atrocities on both sides in the run-up to Israeli independence. There were pogroms since at least the early 19th century in the Levant.
Israel was created by a UN vote. It was not ‘stolen’. There was no sovereign Arab state there to take sovereignty from.
That’s not in contradiction to Israel enduring more terror attacks than any other state. The balance of death is not the same as the balance of morality, or Germany would have been the victim in WW2 vis a vis the Western Allies.
Israel has been ‘bombing’ Gaza because as soon as they withdrew, Hamas started firing rockets almost every day and launching various other attacks.
The 2nd Intifada was because of the failure of the 2000 Camp David Summit. It’s hard to be sure exactly why that failed, but Arafat was reportedly offered 90% of what he wanted, but wouldn’t seem to budge on the ‘right of return’.
Of course, Arafat died a billionaire with gold taps, a wife notorious for her Paris shopping sprees, and with a special refugee agency devoted to the Palestinians alone, funelling an endless supply of cash to the PA. Failure pays, and having to be accountable in their own sovereign state probably looked like too much hard work.
I won’t address that because it’s just a rant and doesn’t address anything specific.
You’re leaving out the bit where you leave Europe to invade another land, and you use terrorism and genocide to cause many to have to flee their homes.
Now, I am actually sympathetic to the argument the Jewish people of Europe should have their own state, to be secure in, given the history and what the German nazi state did. Some land should and could have been found. If anyone should have had to pay for the sins of the German Third Reich and lose some of their land for a Jewish state, it should have been Germany.
However, for you to then take that as justification to go and implement your own “lebensraum” colonisation and ethnic cleansing plan is just… a disgrace, and the most awful stain on the memory of all those for whom we say “Never again”.
Yes you do, you want their land. And you are willing to murder and ethnically cleanse them off it so you can steal it. And you have been doing so for decades, and your state was doing it yesterday, and today, and will do it tomorrow and the day after too.
Ah yes, it’s the Palestinians fault that your demonic “settlers” daily harass Palestinians in the West Bank, in utter impunity, holding state issued rifles, cause they know one phone call and the ITF goons will be there to back them up. And soon as some excuse is invented, the ITF will declare the land of the Palestinians that those settlers covet to be a “military area” – and they’ll force the Palestinians out at gunpoint. And of course, the settlers start building, and expanding.
It’s all the Palestinians’ fault that these settlers and the ITF keep doing this, day after day, year after year, decade after decade. If only the Palestinians would peacefully allow the settlers to steal, then the settlers wouldn’t steal!
What utter nonsense you tell yourself.
That vote called for a state for the Jews AND another for the Arabs! The vote that called for Israel ALSO called for a Palestine! If you call on that (non-binding) vote for the legitimacy of Israel, then you must accept the legitimacy of the other aspect of that vote. Yet Israel has tirelessly worked against that.
Also, 1967 was started by *Israel*.
Your whole sense of identity is built on lies. Lies you must tell yourself to try justify yourself, and hide from your own psyche that your country was – and continues to be – built on oppression, murder, war crimes and genocide, and all in order to STEAL other people’s land. Lies you must tell yourself to hide that your entire identity is built on the most brutal inhumanity towards others.
You are a land of thieves – murderous, psychotic thieves.
Check out these atrocities:
Check out these atrocities:
https://saturday-october-seven.com/#/
Atrocities which were applauded by jeering, baying mobs all over Gaza. Not just “Hamas”. Half-dead, naked young Jewish girls paraded through Gazan streets, raped and abused and then murdered. Again, enjoyed by screaming onlookers like something from 2000 years ago.
What’s happening in the Middle East is complex, I’m no fan of Netanyahu, but to simply ignore the way Hamas hide under schools, nurseries and hospitals with no regard for their own innocents is disgusting, similarly cynically stealing food and medical aid meant for their own people, all the while knowing that gullible, handwringing snowflakes in the West will fall for it.
Palestinians have time and time again rejected peace deals with Israel going back decades because they simply have no desire to coexist. Within that context, Netanyahu exists.
It’s disgusting that
It’s disgusting that terrorists disrupting wonderful sports events. The Italian government shouls bring on the army.
Soon they’ll be raping the Italian woman like they’re doing in the United Kingdom and France, it’s comming to Italy.
Elon Musk posted on X , it will be known in history as The rape of Europe. Anybody that supports these violent barbarians, Plastian terrorists either has an agenda of racial and religious sacred or they highly uneducated barbarians themselves.
Isreal was there 3 1/2 thousand years ago recorded in the Bible. Then around 1800- 2000 years later someone came up with a “peace loving” 🤣 religion called Muslim Islam. This religion does not tolerate any other religion!
*Cites the Bible as
*Cites the Bible as historical evidence* – rational discussion has left the chat…
Also *all* the monotheisms (including Zoroastrianism?) have elements of “this is the *only* truth ergo we’ll remove competitors by force” – and historical purges/massacres. Just ask the Hittites, Amorites etc. (and “Amalek”)!
(There *is* genuine history in the bible – and indeed many other religious works – but it’s a vexed question (even amongst some believers, never mind historians and archaeologists) how to interpret it…)
Prorideengineering. wrote:
Dude, have you seen your spelling, grammar and punctuation?
And wasn’t it the vuelta?
And wasn’t it the vuelta?
Surely the giro is the first grand tour.
Much as I’m loath to defend
Much as I’m loath to defend him I presume he’s talking about IPT being pulled from the Giro dell’Emilia rather than what happened in Spain.
You are of course, correct.
You are of course, correct.
Rendel Harris wrote:
and syntax.