Is there place for protest in cycling? It’s a question currently blazing through the world of cycling, with the final stage of the Vuelta a España cancelled due to pro-Palestine protests that dogged the race from its outset. Their protests were mainly aimed at the inclusion of Israel Premier-Tech in the race, and at times put the whole race into doubt.
According to many of the riders, cycling should be separate from politics – the activists maintaining a right to protest as long as it’s nowhere near a bike. But, as Patrick Fletcher wrote in a feature from the 10 July 2025 issue of Cycling Weekly, bike races have long been the arena for protests. Subscribe to the magazine here.
(Image credit: L’Equipe)
Steeled for action
Phil Anderson was easing himself into the yellow jersey as news broke on 6 July 1982 that 1,300 jobs would be lost at the Usinor steelworks in Denain. That was 90% of the workforce, already decimated from the 10,000-strong contingent of the 1960s.
“Usinor was the lifeblood of Denain,” said Jean Degros, a prominent local basketball player. “The announcement finished off the town.”
Running through the despair was a sense of betrayal, the Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy having stood up for the steelworkers while in opposition but now, as they saw it, turning his back.
Stage five of the 1982 Tour was a team time trial, a scarcely believable 73km linking Orchies with Fontaine-au-Pire. Thirty kilometres from the finish line, the route would pass through Denain. It began as a crisis meeting, but the Tour presented an opportunity; blocking the road was described in a L’Équipe report as an act of “collective spontaneity”.
The first team to set off were Splendor, the Belgian outfit of future world champion Claude Criquielion, leaving Orchies around 1pm. Tour de France boss Jacques Goddet was already in Denain, scrambling to muster a last-minute resolution.
He negotiated hard. According to local newspaper La Voix du Nord, Goddet offered to re-route the TTT through the Usinor plant itself in order to shine a spotlight on the workers’ plight. But it wouldn’t do. Criquielion and his men reached the barricade and came to a halt. Slowly, the message filtered back and the riders received orders from directors’ cars to sit up, turn around and ride back to the start. Meanwhile, the huge crowds gathered at the finish in Fontaine-au-Pire wondered where the riders had got to.
It was a seismic moment. Goddet’s propensity to engage with the public – diplomatically making room for protest while keeping the show on the road – had contributed to his affectionate dubbing as ‘the President of France for the month of July’. As such, there was a sense of bewilderment as he addressed the television cameras in Denain: “To protest is natural, and the Tour de France can be a means to that end, but not to the point of impeding the race and stopping it,” he said, not so much angry as pained.
A line had been crossed, and nothing would be the same again.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Held to ransom
Goddet’s style stands in contrast to the comparatively heavy-handed approach we see today. The current Tour chief Christian Prudhomme has made it clear that protestors must be faced down, and any “ransom” demand rejected. Two protests stand out from recent memory. In 2018, farmers – perhaps the race’s most consistent disruptors – lobbed hay bales into the road and were roundly pepper-sprayed by the police. Ironically, it was this response that actually halted the race as the lingering tear gas blew into the faces of the oncoming riders.
Three years ago, climate activists from Dernière Renovation temporarily stopped a stage by lying in the middle of the road in the shadow of a melting glacier. In truly remarkable scenes, the CEO of the race organiser ASO Yann Le Moenner took it upon himself to assist the police and forcibly start dragging protestors – in this case, two chained together by the neck-from the road.
Times are, of course, rather different. The Tour has continued to expand, and the increase in terror events in the 21st century has necessitated an entirely new, beefed-up security landscape. It was following the attacks in Paris in late 2015 and in Brussels the following spring that the GIGN – a special forces division – was deployed at the Tour for the first time in 2016. It has remained ever since.
The potential for protest is greater than ever, stretching beyond local grievances to global political causes. The rise in climate activism – and more recently, the war on Gaza – have become major flashpoints, with the pro-Palestinian BDS Movement calling for “more peaceful protests than ever” at the Tour. Beyond the threat from steelworkers, these are the two most pressing issues that could disrupt the race’s smooth running this year.
Over the past decade, the security presence has been ramped up by around 25%. Now, the Tour de France route is secured by no fewer than 28,000 officers across France’s various law enforcement divisions, most notably the national police and the Gendarmerie, technically a branch of the military. That equates to eight officers for every kilometre. It’s impossible to fully seal off the Tour de France, but you can get pretty close. The unions representing the Dunkirk steelworkers had already done their maths, but you still feel they’d have come off second best even if they had followed through with their threats. That’s a moot point now, but it has called into question the Tour’s relationship with social protest and, by extension, with society.
A gendarme (L) sprays tear gas at protesters attempting to block the stage’s route, during the 16th stage of the Tour de France in 2018, between Carcassonne and Bagneres-de-Luchon.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
A celebration of France
The Tour de France has often been described as a fête populaire, a celebration involving and even belonging to the people of France. An iron-fisted approach to protestors arguably jeopardises that social contract. Cycling remains free to access by the roadside (for now at least), but censorship of these particular imperfections of French society, while the perfections continue to be traded upon, is perhaps one step towards an event that is effectively sealed off from its people. The privatisation of a national good.
Then again, maybe this isn’t such a recent phenomenon. Just two years after the Denain episode, Bernard Hinault – who had won that year’s Tour – issued the most literally heavy-handed response to a protestor when he went flying fist-first into a dockyarder blockade at the 1984 edition of Paris-Nice. Afterwards, a team time trial was rearranged in Brittany and crammed into the morning before the now-split stage nine. TI-Raleigh-Campagnolo won and Hinault advanced on yellow before taking it two days later and carrying it to Paris. The race moved on rather quickly, in other words.
As for the steelworkers, their jobs were never saved and the remaining staff ground on until 1988 when the Usinor plant was permanently closed. Their cries fell on deaf ears and may have largely been forgotten, but their stand remains historic. The Tour, like time and tide, waits for no man. But for one day, and one day only, it did.
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