When pro-Palestine protestors forced the early abandonment of the Vuelta a España’s final stage in September – the fourth stage of the race to be curtailed – it triggered a chain reaction. In the weeks that followed, Israel-Premier Tech, the focus of the protests, backtracked on earlier assurances and announced a new name and nationality, accepting that their future in the sport was untenable without change. The immediate consequence, however, was the cancellation of the podium ceremony for the GC top-three and the jersey winners.
Race victor Jonas Vingegaard was understandably peeved. “Yeah, it’s shit to end it like this,” he muttered inside a Visma-Lease a Bike car, in footage later shown in the team’s post-race documentary. It seemed as though everyone would simply drift away – an anticlimactic conclusion to 21 tense, turbulent days.
That was until Tom Pidcock’s mum, Sonja, stepped in with other ideas, laying the groundwork for what became the most spontaneous and intimate Grand Tour celebration in history – or, as social media later declared it, the best podium ceremony of all time.
Tom Pidcock with his mum Sonja in Madrid
(Image credit: Sonja Harper)
Sonja and her husband Giles were in Madrid ready to celebrate their son’s third-placed finish in the race. When it became apparent that that wouldn’t be happening as planned, Sonja spoke with Q36.5’s billionaire owner Ivan Glasenberg at the team’s hotel. “I said to Ivan, ‘This isn’t fair – these young men have put all this effort in and have been robbed of their glory’,” Sonja, who organises the Otley Cycle Races, recounts to Cycling Weekly. “I told him we should organise a podium.”
Glasenberg nodded along, but wasn’t following what Sonja was suggesting. “Ivan said that they were all going to dinner that night and that everyone was invited including us. I said to him again, ‘But, Ivan, let’s invite all the teams and make a podium together’. Then he got it and said, ‘That’s a great idea!’ I said to him, ‘I’ll organise it for you, but I don’t have a good contact list except [photographer] Russ Ellis’s phone number’.”
The Q36.5 boss now fully on board with Sonja’s plans, he rang Visma’s manager Richard Plugge, who was immediately enthusiastic. Within minutes, Plugge had set up a WhatsApp group comprising all the relevant teams, and convened a hotel car park meeting with his team’s staff who took on responsibility as ceremony organisers. “If it works, it’s a good conclusion for everyone, and a picture for history,” Plugge said, as recorded in the aforementioned documentary. “And if not, then we tried.”
While Plugge was busy organising the guest list, Visma’s chief business officer Jasper Saeijs was put in charge of logistics. “I said, if we do this, we have to do it right,” Saeijs recalls to Cycling Weekly. “We were never going to have the same quality as the real celebration, but everyone who had made the Vuelta special deserved some kind of celebration.” The first thing he had to do was to tell a downcast Vingegaard that he would get the chance to celebrate. “Jonas was already in his normal clothes, and I told him he had to change into his cycling clothing and prepare for a ceremony.”
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Phone calls were made to the race organisers, who confirmed that someone was on their way with the trophies, jerseys and podium backdrop – and were promptly snarled up in congestion in the centre of Madrid. “They didn’t know if they’d be able to make it past the protesters and get to us in time,” Saeijs says. Pidcock’s mum came up with a contingency plan. “If the Vuelta organisers couldn’t make it, I suggested we go to the hotel kitchen and make trophies out of tinfoil!”
Thankfully the podium essentials arrived and Saeijs and his team then set about creating the scene. “We needed the backdrop in place, so we attached it to a rental minivan,” Saeijs says. Only one problem: it wasn’t tall enough. “We needed it to be higher, so I asked one of the mechanics what he thought. We were brainstorming a few ideas and then he said, ‘We have some poles that we can put on top of the car.” According to Sonja, these were in fact traffic cones. “They attached the backdrop to traffic cones on top of a van,” she laughs. “It was a bit wonky, but they straightened it out and in the end it looked amazing.”
As for the podium steps, Visma coolboxes of varying heights took on a new function. “We wrote one, two and three on them using a black Sharpie pen,” recounts Saeijs. Those scribbled letters later became the most-talked about aspect of the ceremony on social media.
With the stage set but darkness descending, attention focused on lighting the rushed-together spectacle. “We parked three of our team cars in front of the podium with their headlights on, but too many people were in the way, so we couldn’t see the podium,” Saeijs says.
Sonja, watching on in admiration as her idea took shape in an hour, policed the crowd, which was swelling with riders and staff from other teams. “I put my bossy race organiser head on and was saying to people, ‘Excuse me, stand over there!’” Relief arrived in the form of TV Denmark, whose crew – glued to Vingegaard throughout the race – offered something far better than car headlights. “They follow Jonas everywhere, and they let us use their stage lights,” Saeijs says.
But the atmosphere still needed one final ingredient. “You need music to lighten up any party,” Saeijs insists. Enter Thijs Roelen, Visma press officer turned impromptu DJ. “He decided on Eye of the Tiger for the entrance of the riders,” Saeijs confirms.
There was also the small matter of playing the right anthem for Vingegaard, although even that proved surprisingly complicated. “Denmark has two types of national anthems, and in the morning the race organisers had asked us to help them in choosing the right anthem to play,” Saeijs says. “Thankfully we had researched it before so we already knew which one was the correct one and we downloaded it.”
(Image credit: Sonja Harper)
Everything set, the moment then came for the car park ceremony to begin. Visma sourced some champagne and spectators handed round beer and pizza – but then, yet another delay. “UAE won the team prize but they were apparently reluctant to join in at first,” Sonja says.
“When they found that Mads Pedersen [green jersey] and Matthew Riccitello [white jersey] were coming, they realised they couldn’t turn it down. They still turned up 30 minutes late, mind you.” When UAE finally arrived – their star rider João Almeida had finished second on GC – the party finally got underway.
“Also funny was that the race organiser who’d brought the backdrop, jerseys and trophies didn’t know the protocol of the ceremony, so we had to be creative with how we did it,” Saeijs remembers. “We said that the GC would go first, then the team prize, and then the jerseys. It was really improvised, and in five minutes we’d decided on the order.” Master of ceremonies was selected almost at random, Sonja remembers: “He was a guy who wasn’t used to commentating, and he was naming all the riders quietly without any microphone.”
The moment was captured on smartphones by the hundred or so people gathered, a uniquely improvised celebration pulled together at speed and destined to linger in the memory of everyone who witnessed it. At one point, Sonja noticed Vingegaard looking straight at her. “I’d never met Jonas before, but when he got off the Visma bus in his kit, he was looking across the car park smiling at me. I pointed him out to Giles, and I realised that Jonas was probably the only mum-minded person there. Richard must have told him that it was Tom’s mum’s idea and he was saying thank you to me. It was really lovely, really sweet.”
(Image credit: Bram Berkien/Team Visma | Lease a Bike)
Balanced on an upturned coolbox, Vingegaard beamed with amused delight. “At first I was disappointed not to get the celebration in Madrid, but fortunately we could make our own celebration and it was a really nice moment, really special,” he said in his team’s documentary. “It shows how, in cycling, even though we’re competitors, we can still get everyone together and celebrate in a nice way.”
The Vuelta’s organisers hope the whole episode remains a one-off, with a return next year to a full-scale finale of spotlights and fireworks in front of thousands of fans. If not, Sonja Pidcock stands ready to help again. “I’d like to do it again for my own benefit but I’m not sure it’ll wash,” she laughs.
“All I wanted to do was to applaud and give my son a hug, but in the end everyone created a fabulous moment. If it was in Madrid, it would have been immense, but they would have celebrated in front of thousands of strangers, and we wouldn’t have got a look-in. As it happened, the riders got to celebrate with the people most important to them, and you could tell by the smiles on their faces that they were so delighted.”
This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 18 December 2025. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.
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