A growing humanitarian disaster with ties to cycling raises questions almost identical to those the sport faced about Gaza.
Cor Vos, Kristof Ramon
Just over a month ago, pro cycling was consumed with a single topic: Israel and the war in Gaza.
After weeks of protests against the Israel-Premier Tech team’s presence at the Vuelta a España, some of which threatened the safety of all riders in the race, the event culminated in a chaotic, neutralized final stage and an ad hoc podium ceremony hastily pulled together hours later in a hotel parking lot. The team was then disinvited from October’s Giro dell’Emilia in Italy and voluntarily withdrew from several other late-season races over safety concerns.
Its participation in next year’s Tour de France was questioned by regional authorities in Barcelona – host to the Grand Depart – who suggested the team was not welcome thanks to its ties to Israel, a state increasingly accused of genocide for its conduct of the war. Its star rider is actively trying to leave the team. Even longtime sponsors expressed dismay, issuing what were essentially ultimatums to drop the team’s association with the state.
The war is coming home for Israel-Premier Tech
Riders are refusing to sign for the squad, morale is suffering, and rumours swirl over a name change and sponsors.
Under the sustained pressure, the team eventually did just that; its final identity next season is unknown, but Israel will not be part of the name and branding and Canadian-Israeli team owner Sylvan Adams – a staunch backer of Israel and its war in Gaza – will reportedly step back from his direct role. Even that wasn’t enough to save one relationship, as co-title sponsor Premier Tech announced last week that it would stop sponsoring the team effective immediately, saying “it has become untenable for us to continue as a sponsor.”
Today, a second crime against humanity is unfolding, and one that also directly implicates a nation state – this one with far deeper ties to pro road racing. And with a few scattered exceptions, the sport has been silent.
Partly, this may be because the 2025 road season is over. Riders are home, enjoying a few blessed, well-earned weeks of relative downtime before training camps begin. There are no races where protesters might gather en masse. But part of the silence may be due to something else: a collective blindspot in many western countries to a long-running disaster. As with Gaza, it’s one connected to WorldTour races and even the top men’s team in the sport, including the best cyclist in the world, a supremely talented, seemingly amiable dude who it’s hard to imagine is OK being associated with such a horrible thing. And yet, here we are.
A tale of two tragedies
The Gaza Strip and Darfur, in western Sudan, are roughly 1,300 miles (2,100 km) apart by straightline distance, but they are bound together by misery: the sites of two of the worst humanitarian crises of the 21st century, both of them human-caused.
Gaza has been largely destroyed in the Israel-Hamas war that proceeded from the horrific terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7, 2023 that killed over 1,200 people and saw hundreds more taken hostage. Credible satellite data estimates suggest that at least 83% of all buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed by the two-year Israeli military campaign unleashed in response to the Hamas attack. An even higher percentage of farmland has been razed or otherwise ruined, ending any hope that Gaza’s inhabitants could help feed themselves in the immediate future. Around two million residents, 90 percent of the territory’s population, have been driven from their homes and displaced at least once. And of those residents, at least 69,000 have been killed and another 170,000 wounded; a January 2025 study in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet estimates casualty figures may be undercounted, and effectively rebuts the idea that all of them are combatants; 59% of the 28,000 deaths for which demographic information exists are women, children, or residents over the age of 65.
Israel-Premier Tech removed the “Israel” name from team vehicles and eventually rider kits as protests mounted.
There are no such high-confidence estimates for El Fasher, sometimes styled as Al-Fashir, the capital of North Darfur. It’s there that, in late October, ethnically Arab paramilitary forces engaged in a two-and-a-half-year-old civil war with Sudan’s government overran defenses and took control of the city. El Fasher’s estimated population isn’t clear, but may have swelled to as many as a million thanks to refugees fleeing violence, many of them from persecuted ethnic groups like Masalit, Fur, and Zaghawa. That paramilitary organization, the Rapid Support Forces, had besieged El Fasher since May 2024. Human rights experts warned for months that if the RSF took the city, El Fasher would experience vicious ethnic cleansing, and while reports of the atrocities are still emerging, that is exactly what appears to be happening.
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