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news
Glasgow world championships road race stopped due to protest (GCN) 3UCI Cycling World Championships road race stopped as protester reportedly “cements hand to road”
Protesters put an almost hour-long halt to today’s UCI Cycling World Championships men's road race in Scotland, blocking the road – with one reportedly cementing their hand to the surface – and forcing the riders to stop eighty kilometres into the route between Edinburgh and the finishing circuits in Glasgow.
As the riders entered a hilly section of the route between Bonnybridge and Lennoxtown, approaching Crow Road, a strong nine-rider breakaway containing Great Britain’s Owain Doull and Ireland’s Rory Townsend was stopped with 191km remaining due to the protest.
A group of chasers and the main peloton (who, of course, were unable to be informed in advance due to the lack of race radios at the world championships) were also stopped as the race organisers dealt with the incident which, according to GCN-Eurosport commentator Adam Blythe, involved one or more protesters “cementing their hand to the road”.
Environmental group This Is Rigged have claimed responsibility for the protest and said four of its activists were involved. Police Scotland also confirmed that five people were arrested after the road was cleared.
This is Rigged recently targeted the Scottish Parliament and the Grangemouth oil and gas petrochemical plant, the largest manufacturing site of cycling team sponsor Ineos.
In a statement, one of the protesters, 21-year-old Cat, said: “The fact that Ineos has been allowed to sponsor a team in the race around the Campsie Fells – which were engulfed in wildfires last month – is a disgrace and an insult to the both cycling community and the people of Scotland.
“We cannot continue with business as usual while our country burns and our futures are ruined. Time is of the essence and we need to act like it. The Scottish government must stand up to Westminster and oppose all new oil and gas, and implement a fair transition now.”
In the wake of the sudden race stoppage, Police Scotland confirmed that it was "aware of a protest in the Carron Valley area" and "officers are currently in attendance and engaging with protesters".
Images circulating also appear to confirm that the protest involved cement, as officers took over half an hour to remove the protesters and begin to clear the road.
The UCI said it was "working closely with all relevant authorities to minimise disruption to the race and also to ensure the safety of riders as our paramount concern".
UCI President David Lappartient also told the riders that, while the bunch could be swiftly rerouted to allow the race to restart, the lengthy delay owed to the fact that it would prove much more difficult to reroute the event’s vast cavalcade of motor vehicles, including medical and emergency personnel.
The neutralisation was eventually ended at 12.15pm, over fifty minutes after the riders initially stopped, with the groups heading back up the road according to their corresponding time gaps before the protest halted the race.
Of course, this isn’t the first time that climate protesters have put a stop to a major cycling race by blocking the road.
Just last year, activists from the French environmental campaign group Dernière Rénovation staged two protests at the Tour de France.
The first, on stage 13, saw EF Education-EasyPost’s Alberto Bettiol stopped in his tracks by a group of protesters who sat tied to each other across the road, blocking the race’s path, while setting off flares.
The protest, which forced the stage to be paused for over ten minutes, was quickly claimed by Dernière Rénovation, who accompanied a photo of the demonstration on their website with the caption: “Non-violent disruption is our last chance to be heard and avoid the worst consequences of global warming.”
Some of the eight protesters also wore t-shirts with the slogan “We have 989 days left”, in an attempt to highlight the urgent need for governments to act on the climate crisis.
Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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RIP brother.
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42 comments
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Looking forward to the Daily Mail et al coming to the defence of cyclists held up by a climate protest...<taps fingers>...<whistles>...<looks at watch>...
For the record, I'm all for More Of This Sort Of Thing - as our collective governments aren't taking the future of the planet anywhere near seriously enough. There's no cycling on a dead planet.
Plus pro cycling is addicted to Big Oil's money no matter how dirty/bloody it is, so is totally fair game.
Indeed - if we're lucky we'll be dead of weather directly (felled by a blown-over tree in it's tit-for-tat upon the humans) or quickly drowned in a flood of raindrops dumped on the flood of humans by Mummy Nature as she deals with the plague proportions & predelictions of we two-legged rascals.
But if we're unlucky it'll be a long drawn-out demise full of angst and suffering in one or another Mad Max style worlds following the breakdown of the larger economic systems including the food supply, a really savage pandemic or Pukin setting off some really bad bombs. Inerich oil billionaires will attempt to hide in New Zealand or some other bolt-hole but will minced by events anyway.
*************
Personally I stopped watching so-called "professional sport" decades ago because it isn't sport but just another circus in which we not only pay to get in but have the circus performers doing their antic to sell us loadsa stuff - just another armature in the vast consumer-producer madhouse. Now they also pollute and nuisance wantonly as well.
Still, many enjoy fiddlin' as their local Rome catches alight.
That's a tough call. Do they hate cyclists more than they support the oil companies?
Maybe as more and more places feel the initial effects of our climate catastrophe, more people will feel the need to make a stand against Big Oil and the many organisations and politicians that have been bought by them.
I look forward to the day that a politician stating that they're on the side of car drivers (and thus against pedestrians and active travel) and licencing more oil drilling, will be the complete end of their career. Unfortunately, it'll require people to stop believing MSM narratives and to look around themselves.
DON'T LOOK UP!
With the protest splashed over most media outlets I'm reminded of the one of the final scenes in the film 'Misbehaviour' when the Keeley Hawes character comments on the protesters interuption of the 1970 Miss World contest being on the front page of all the newspapers "...clever girls". A good Sunday's work by the protesters I'd say.
It won't be the planet that dies, although it may be humanity. And if that happens it's because we deserved it, no more, no less.
It's a weird kind of arrogance to assume the human race is necessary, or even desirable, to the health of Earth. We shall probably become just another species that couldn't hack it when things got tough.
And in any case, in a couple of billion years our galaxy will collide with another and there won't be any walking wounded when that happens.
It's being so cheerful that keeps me going.
The point is surely the mass extinction event we are causing, rather than the fate of the planet itself.
Exactly. The planet will be fine, just different. And unless we start build space arks pretty sharpish, we (humanity) won't be around to see it.
Probably something along the lines of what Graham Simpson, the Scottish Conservatives net zero and transport spokesman said:
"It's utterly nonsensical for a group which claims to stand for environmental protection to target an event promoting active, green travel like cycling - and raises a huge question mark about this publicity-seeking group's true motives."
You heard it here first - pro-cycling is a promotion for active travel.
This is complete nonsense. This does nothing for the cause of a greenner planet. Cylists in general are green so why attack them? I notice a lot of protesters run around with dyed hair and synthetic clothing. The dye comes from oil products. Plastics, e.g. in clothing and shoes come from oil products. Getting to the protests presumably use vehicles burning or generated by oil based products, even electric ones.Totally out of order to disrupt peoples lives who will no longer support your idealogy. I live for a greener planet just not this stupidity.
Cycling as a form of transport does indeed have one hell of a lot going for it, environmentally, but cycle races especially top end world class cycle races, much less so.
Pro cycle racing unfortunately is anything but green, what with its massive global transportation needs, huge numbers of vehicles, including helicopters, following the races for support and broadcast and a significant number of teams being bankrolled by petrochemical companies or oil-producing states (UAE, Bahrain Victorious, INEOS, Astana). These protestors aren't exactly blocking the cycle lanes to stop Joe Bloggs commuting to work. You can disagree with their opinions or their modus operandi but it's pretty hard to argue that pro racing isn't a legitimate target in their terms.
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