Jan Ullrich and Rick Zabel have delivered a scathing assessment of how the Vuelta a Espana has handled the escalating pro-Palestinian protests that have disrupted this year’s race, warning that the ev...
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Ulrich and Zabel blaming the Vuelta organizers for not having a 'backbone' to kick out IPT from the race.
I find that to be a difficult situation really. After all, the organisers' hands were tied in respect of the invites by the UCI's rules. At another time, before the most recent points system and the compulsory wildcard thing was introduced, it would have been fairly straightforward; Unipublic would just not have invited IPT, or would have retracted their invite when they caught wind of the likelihood of protest and replaced them with a team with a less contentious sponsor. Late changes to invites have happened in reasonably recent past - Astana being added to the 2008 Giro, at the expense of NGC Medical, just a week before the start; Fuji-Servetto got added to the 2009 Giro late on in April, and Ceramica Flaminia were originally slated to be invited before Lance Armstrong held RCS to ransom over the fact Filippo Simeoni would be riding for them; and BMC being un-invited from Dwars door Vlaanderen at the eleventh hour in 2010 for reneging on an agreement to send some of their big name riders; both times those teams were replaced by Xacobeo-Galicia, known of course for their extensive results racing in the Northern Classics and the Italian spring...
Sylvain Adams has also previously threatened to sue the UCI over losing invites when his team got relegated. The oxymoronic "mandatory wildcard" rule was in fact already on the books before this albeit in a slightly modified form, but Adams' team facing relegation taking away the certainty of their spot at the top table was enough for him to threaten litigation, and the UCI backed down and so here we are with this awkward system whereby the UCI has made it mandatory for the Vuelta to invite a team that they know is going to create a headache for them, with no mechanism by which to avoid the problem without inviting both a lawsuit from IPT
and contractual breach issues with the UCI.
This would have applied whether they made the change before or during the race, and obviously they have tried to avoid the situation by asking the team if they wouldn't mind leaving, but of course the team then are under no obligation to leave no matter how much the organisers may have stressed that it would really be best for all concerned for them to do so. Obviously the riders in the race are in a difficult position, and certainly it isn't made any easier by Adams' doubling and trebling down on his position over the last couple of seasons in the face of other protests.