The final stage of La Vuelta did not end as scripted. It couldn’t. Madrid was the scene of a historic demonstration, probably the largest in support of Palestine since the genocide began. The cycling spectacle was halted three times, but what really broke down was the fiction that everything can continue as if nothing were happening while tens of thousands of people are being killed and an entire people struggles to survive hunger, thirst and occupation.
This is not just about sport. As with Eurovision or matches involving Israeli teams, the issue runs deeper: what role does global entertainment play in constructing a single narrative that legitimises indifference? The official narrative insists that conflicts are terrible, but that the show must go on. The protest in Madrid broke that inertia: it reminded us that human life is not expendable or interchangeable for a product packaged for television.
The presence of Israel Premier Tech in the peloton was like pouring fuel on the fire. A team designed as a soft power tool, exporting the narrative of ‘combat-proven’ civilian technology to the world. The government knew it, the police knew it, they knew that their participation was causing outrage, but they simply shifted the responsibility to the organisers of La Vuelta. The political decision to remove the team never came. Instead, the response was police charges, beatings and rubber bullets against protesters.
That political calculation – avoiding a legal conflict with a private company – ended up being a major mistake: the spectacle was protected, but the narrative was fractured. Because what exploded in the streets was the echo of a collective cry that had already been heard in Pontevedra, Bilbao and Figueres: ‘Israel kills, Europe sponsors’. A slogan that denounces both Israel’s direct responsibility for the massacre and the complicity of the states and institutions that continue to look the other way.
The government preferred not to risk a lawsuit with a private company. It preferred to keep the show going. What it could not sustain was the illusion that ‘nothing matters too much.’ Yesterday, the streets proved it wrong.
Madrid has made it clear that streets and roads will no longer be neutral spaces when the lives of a people are at stake. The protest is not only solidarity with Palestine, but also a rejection of the cultural anaesthesia that tries to convince us that nothing matters too much, that entertainment is above human dignity.
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