{"id":138320,"date":"2025-09-15T06:52:14","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T06:52:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/138320\/"},"modified":"2025-09-15T06:52:14","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T06:52:14","slug":"the-vuelta-podium-you-didnt-get-to-see","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/138320\/","title":{"rendered":"The Vuelta podium you didn\u2019t get to see"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/p>\n

News & Racing<\/a><\/p>\n

Cycling at its most pure: an Esky podium in a hotel carpark.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Iain<\/p>\n

Russ Ellis for Gruber Images, Cor Vos<\/p>\n

The 2025 Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a will go down in history as a fraught affair, defined as much by events off the bike as by the racing. Slow-simmering disquiet<\/a> about the presence of Israel-Premier Tech at the race boiled over as the race dragged on; the last week of the race<\/a> was beset by increasingly disruptive pro-Palestine protests, with the final stage of the race into Madrid neutralised and then cancelled altogether<\/a>. After three weeks of racing around an entire country, the Vuelta\u2019s last gasp was a tweet<\/a>: “for security reasons, stage 21 of La Vuelta has been ended early. There will be no podium ceremony.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Vingegaard and team dismount and head into the team cars. <\/p>\n

“No podium ceremony”? Sort of, but not really. A stage and assorted infrastructure had been set up at the Cibeles Fountain in the centre of Madrid, where crowds of thousands thronged to watch a bike race that would never pass, and that ceremony never happened, it\u2019s true. But the moment did not go completely unmarked.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After night had fallen, at the Visma-Lease a Bike hotel, an alternative celebration was in the works. <\/p>\n

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\n News & Racing<\/a>
\n Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a<\/a>
\n Visma-Lease a Bike<\/a>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"News & Racing Cycling at its most pure: an Esky podium in a hotel carpark.\u00a0 Russ Ellis for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":138321,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-138320","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-cycling","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}