Cut trees, thumb tacks, and road blocks - Vuelta peloton afraid of increasing aggressiveness of protests

Fear and tension grows amidst the Vuelta a Espana as the protests against Israel - Premier Tech grow in size and intensity. The peloton has now been racing into improvised finish lines, neutralizations and has had protestors cause several crashes in the race, as well as cut trees into the course and put thumb tacks to disrupt the race. It's reaching boiling point for many with no end in sight, as Jack Haig explained this morning.

"We decided that if there is an incident, we would try to neutralize the race and then that would be it because in the end racing to an undefined finish line is not really fair sport," Bahrain - Victorious' Jack Haig said in words to Cyclingnews.

Daniel Friebe, at the Vuelta, has argued this morning that a lot of the desire to neutralize the race in case of another protest and road block is because "they have no appetite to race for improvised finish-lines like yesterday‘s". This has happened in Bilbao already on stage 11, and once again took place on the summit finish to Castro de Herville. The success of these protests - when it comes to disrupting the race - is likely to trigger more of them, and the summit finishes are specially at risk since it is harder to control the thousands that make the trip to see the riders.

This Tuesday, Israel has conducted an airstrike in the city of Doha, Qatar, aiming at a top Hamas members. It is unclear at this point whether there was success or not in its goal. As time goes by more and more anger builds up towards the Middle Eastern nation, mostly due to the lack of action against the constant military actions conducted against several of its neighbours.

"Unfortunately, we're being caught in the middle of something that maybe doesn't even really involve us and at the moment we are kind of just the pawns in a very large chess game that unfortunately is affecting us," Haig explains. One of cycling's greatest aspects is the proximity and contact with the public on the roads. At this Vuelta, that proximity is being weaponized, and Haig admits that he - and most likely many of his colleagues - are not feeling safe amidst growing dismay and aggressive actions towards the riders.

"Yesterday it started to become a little bit uncomfortable because there were some acts to maybe deliberately try and harm the riders by cutting down trees, by putting the thumb packs on the ground to deliberately light fires. It is now starting to get a little bit uncomfortable".

Up to this point, only one major incident took place against the team, which was a road block at the team time-trial. All others have involved riders and staff of other teams that have no involvement. In Valladolid, there are serious concerns regarding the possibility of running the time-trial this Thursday. "I think everyone would quite like to arrive in Madrid, but we need it to happen in a fair way where riders are safe," the Australian argues.