Sport washing is associated with certain countries, why not Israel? | Cycling

In the summer of 2020, a group of five cyclists from Ramallah were out for a ride when they were stopped by a group of Israeli settlers. According to Reuters, upon discovering that the cyclists were Palestinian, the settlers started throwing stones at them. Four escaped into a nearby field. One, Samer Kurdi, lost his balance and was hit repeatedly with a metal bar, causing serious injuries. It is not known if there were any arrests.

For Chris Froome and his colleagues at the Israel Start-Up Nation Pro Cycling Team, the roads of the occupied West Bank were a much safer place last November, when they traversed the Judean Hills on an open training drive. English-language media flew to Israel and had full access to the team during their first camp in Israel since 2019. The team and their supporters were treated with luxury hospitality, taken on beach visits and kayak excursions. But then Israel Start-Up Nation, the fledgling team relaunched last week as Israel-Premier Tech, has always known the value of good PR.

Peter Sagan was one of its first ambassadors, and the signing of other prominent cyclists such as Froome, Sep Vanmarcke and Dan Martin have helped increase his sporting reputation. But the team’s most enthusiastic publicist is billionaire co-owner Sylvan Adams, a self-styled “ambassador general of the State of Israel” who sees in sport a means to improve the position of the country in the middle widespread criticism for its human rights record, treatment of Palestinians and continued defiance of international law.

It was Adams who pushed through Israel’s bold £9m bid to host the start of the Giro d’Italia in 2018, the first part of a unprecedented investment in international sport. The same year it built the region’s first Olympic-level velodrome, which will host the world junior athletics championships in August. Argentina and Uruguay visited Tel Aviv for an international friendly in 2019, as did Paris Saint-Germain and Lille last August for the French equivalent of the Community Shield. There is even serious talk within FIFA of a joint bid for the 2030 World Cup with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Adams insists that Israel Premier-Tech is apolitical and not a government project, although it receives funding, a “woefully small amount”, he says, from the national tourism board. And while countries like Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Kazakhstan sponsor World Tour teams, none have been as open or eloquent about their soft power goals. “We are perceived as a war zone here in Israel, we are in a state of conflict,” Adams said. “We want the team to help tell the story you don’t usually hear about.” Ron Baron, the team’s other co-owner, describes it as a form of “sports diplomacy.” According to Guy Niv, one of the few Israeli riders on the team and a former army sniper, all riders understand that “by being on an Israeli team, they are ambassadors of the country.”

When we refer to sportswashing, the attempt by nation-states to clean up their reputations and launder their crimes, there is a certain type of country that we generally think of. We have no problem linking the multiple abuses by Qatar, Saudi Arabia or China to their investment in the sport. And yet there seems to be some reluctance to refer to Israel in similar terms, even though its goals are expressed even more explicitly, its crimes well documented by human rights groups.

The main goal of Israeli sports diplomacy is that when you hear the name of the country, you don’t think of any of this. You will not think about the military checkpoints or the bombing of Gaza or the Palestinian occupation, or the Palestinians at all. Instead, you’ll think of golden beaches, rooftop cocktails, Lionel Messi and Chris Froome bathing in a glorious sunset. “Most people don’t care about politics,” Adams has said. “Through world-class cultural and sporting events, we can reach the silent majority.”

But push the door a little, and all the classic sportswear washing tropes are present: denial, quackery, the curious mix of disbelief and aggression. “This is a peaceful country, it sees and upsets people who work in totalitarian regimes,” Adams told Cycling Weekly in 2020. in response to questions about Israel’s human rights abuses. Meanwhile, Twitter users quickly realized that when Froome’s move to the Israel Start-Up Nation was announced, his Twitter photo, a photo of the Giro showing several Palestinian flags in the crowd, was quietly erased.

In many ways, cycling is the ideal partner for laundering sports: a sport without a true tradition of political activism, where cash-strapped teams are generally not overly cautious about where the money comes from. But there is another dimension to this: for many, riding a bike is synonymous with freedom, the open road, the intimate connection between humans and the land. For Palestinian cyclists, who face daily checkpoints, roadblocks, violence and economic hardship, cycling is their own silent form of resistance. “It is our duty to maintain our relationship with this land,” a Palestinian cyclist named Sohaib Samara told The Guardian in 2020. “If we stop moving, the occupants will steal more.”

And so, for Israel, sport serves a dual role: both a positive reinforcement and a tool of repression. In March 2018, an up-and-coming Palestinian cyclist named Alaa al-Dali attended a march in Gaza on his bicycle, wearing cycling gear, to protest against Israel’s refusal to allow him to travel abroad to participate in international competitions. According to a United Nations report, an Israeli sniper shot him in the leg, which later had to be amputated after Israeli authorities denied his request to leave Gaza for treatment. Now he competes as a paracyclist.