I said after the Bilbao stage was canceled that they set a dangerous precedent and it would happen again. This race has been a complete shambles, the worst GT I've ever seen.
I worry about the future of racing in Spain..
Many Spanish races have gone on this year and last without being disrupted by protests.
Protests against IPT because of Adams/sportswashing are not unique to Spain either. In fact, I'm watching a bunch of Palestinian flags waving all over the start/finish in Montreal too.
Many of those Spanish races that have gone on this year have in fact been in those regions that saw the most protests. IPT were not at Itzulia, admittedly, but they were at Catalunya.
Again, I think the problem sports-administration-wise is that the Vuelta cannot enforce the removal of the team once the race has started, but they are forced by the UCI's current rules to extend an invite to them due to the paradoxical "mandatory wildcard", so it is only if IPT voluntarily hand back their invite that they can avoid the issue. They knew it was going to cause problems, but they were more or less powerless to prevent it without opening themselves up to the risk of being sued by Adams/IPT, or sanctioned by the UCI.
The Vuelta, however, is a major institution in the sport with 70 years' continuous running, with earlier runs making it almost a century old, and which has been one of the pre-eminent stage races in world cycling for much of that run, and at the very least the last 40-45 years since its transition to the current format - and that has ASO as a major stakeholder. IPT is a middling Johnny-come-lately team which is 11 years old at any level and less than that at the highest level (and got relegated for utter mediocrity in the last WT cycle, although it should earn its place back thanks to some much more shrewd management decisions over the past three years than during the preceding period where they overspent on legacy deals to old riders based on what they
were rather than what they
are) - and is losing two of its best riders in the off-season. They are neither a team that is at the absolute pinnacle such that their absence will completely change the landscape of the sport, like might be the case for UAE or Visma, nor do they have the extent of history and tradition that their absence would be strongly felt due to being part of the furniture, like Quick Step, Lotto or Movistar. They're just a middle of the road team that could easily be replaced, and replacing them on the startlist would have solved all of the issues that this Vuelta saw in a heartbeat (but would have created new off-bike ones).
The race has been a complete mess, but if IPT aren't there, there are no problems. It's not like 2023 where you had the disastrous opening TTT and the overreactions to the weather resulting in the complete messes of timing and racing on stages 2 and 9 where the GC men were riding in like cyclotourists on perfectly safe roads with their times already having been set based on an arbitrary line drawn on soaking wet roads.
That was a farce of the organisers' making. The only reason anything happened in 2025 was the organisers being forced to invite IPT.
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