‘A deliberate tactic to deflect’: Is state money a growing liability for pro cycling?

The myth of sport as a sanctuary from the real world is dead. Across football, boxing and golf, autocratic regimes have bought their way onto the global stage, leveraging flagship events to launder reputations, mask human rights abuses and project a veneer of progressivism. Cycling is far from immune. In fact, handcuffed to a chronically fragile, sponsor-dependent financial model, the pro peloton is arguably more vulnerable to the shifting tides of geopolitics than any other sport.

Let’s not be naive: cycling has always been influenced by politics. Today, however, nation states have more influence over the sport than ever before, with teams, race organisations and even the UCI becoming ever more reliant on links with sovereign wealth benefactors. This wave of nation-state wealth entering professional cycling began 20 years ago, when the government of Kazakhstan revived the remnants of the fallen Liberty Seguros team to create the entity now known as XDS-Astana. Teams with links to the states of Bahrain, Israel, Saudi Arabia and most prominently the United Arab Emirates have followed.

These nations, all of which have big question marks hanging over their human rights records, have invested hundreds of millions of euros into the sport. Their stated aims have been to develop domestic cycling and to promote tourism, but experts argue that their motivations are, in reality, more political. Should cycling be pushing back? Has its reliance on nation states gone too far?

Until this year, cycling had a long, if unofficial, relationship with the state of Israel. Ahead of the 2025 Vuelta a España, the team then known as Israel-Premier Tech (IPT) had represented the nation for a decade. Owned and bankrolled by Israeli-Canadian businessman and “self-appointed Israeli ambassador” Sylvan Adams, the team was initially called Israel Start-Up Nation and was, in its earlier seasons, part-funded by the Israeli tourist board.

As IPT was targeted by mass protests at the Vuelta – opposing Israeli military action in Gaza, which Gaza’s health ministry says has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians – the race descended into a logistical and security nightmare. With protestors blocking key sections of the race, organisers were forced to neutralise stage 11’s finale into Bilbao, with the final day called off before the race entered the centre of Madrid, where thousands were demonstrating on the finishing circuit. By the end of the race, it was clear that IPT could not continue with an explicitly Israeli identity. Soon after the team’s licence changed hands to sport and event company NSN backed by Swiss investment company Stoneweg. It is, however, widely suspected that Adams remains the team’s principal funder.

The fallout has outlasted the race itself. The Vuelta’s planned return to the Canary Islands in 2026 was cancelled amid uncertainty over the team’s participation, while NSN, citing UCI rules, did not ride this year’s Itzulia Basque Country.

The debacle of the 2025 Vuelta was a consequence of cycling’s deep entanglement with nation states, and a stark example of the sport’s vulnerability to the shifting tides of geopolitics. The closer the sport ties itself to state funding, the greater the blowback whenever those states cross a moral line in the eyes of the public.

“We shouldn’t be surprised when world events start tumbling over into sport,” says Brian Cookson, who was president of the UCI between 2013 and 2017. “Sponsors shouldn’t be surprised if what they are promoting becomes the focus of dissent… Sport’s not separate from wider society, it’s part of it [and] international sport is not separate from international issues… whether it’s hostility between nation states, between economic models, political models or racial models, or whatever.”

If La Vuelta revealed the danger posed by nation-state investment, what comes next could cause lasting damage to professional cycling. Yet IPT was small fry compared with UAE Team Emirates-XRG and their affiliated women’s team, UAE Team L’imad. Human rights groups allege that the UAE is complicit in war crimes in Sudan, supplying arms and deploying mercenaries in support of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which the UN and others estimate are linked to the deaths of between 150,000 and 400,000 Sudanese people.

Although the conflict in Sudan does not attract as much attention as hostilities in Gaza, it is currently the world’s worst humanitarian crisis – one where the UAE is alleged to be backing paramilitary forces to secure its own regiointerests. Those interests include Sudan’s gold, its strategic Red Sea ports, and its vast swathes of fertile arable land. With the UAE set to host the UCI Road Worlds in Abu Dhabi in 2028, UCI president David Lappartient has praised the country as a “very strong partner”.

But cycling’s financial reliance on the region is inviting quiet but steady scrutiny. While a sudden wave of public protest on the scale of the Vuelta is unlikely, the UAE’s worsening geopolitical footprint ensures that the road to Abu Dhabi will be paved with increasingly uncomfortable ethical questions. “The UAE’s sports investments are part of this broader strategy to use sport as a deliberate tactic to deflect from the reality of abuses. Unfortunately, the cycling team is part of this strategy,” says Joey Shea, senior researcher in the UAE and Saudi Arabia for Human Rights Watch. She believes that cycling teams should take responsibility for allowing themselves to be used by nation states to launder their reputations. Shea cites UN guiding principles. “What steps, if any, have they identified to mitigate the risk of reputation laundering? These sports teams and individual players have a responsibility to mitigate that risk,” she adds.

That scrutiny is intensifying. Ahead of the 2026 Tour de France, a coalition of human rights groups wrote to the UCI calling for UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s licence to be suspended over the UAE’s alleged support for the RSF. The team’s response was brief: “As a sports team, we don’t engage in geopolitical commentary.” During the race, Human Rights Watch said it had asked the team whether any contract clauses prevented riders from speaking out about UAE abuses, and that it had received no reply.

Saudi Arabia, whose public investment fund (PIF) backs Australian WorldTour teams Jayco AlUla and Liv AlUla Jayco, is also widely criticised for its human rights record, as is Bahrain, which owns Bahrain Victorious. This influx of Gulf money is a familiar headache for Brian Cookson. As UCI president in 2017, he faced criticism from human rights groups when Bahrain and the UAE first entered the WorldTour. His defence, then as now, hinges on a sense of global pragmatism: if the rest of the world is open for business with these regimes, a sports governing body cannot be expected to act as a moral gatekeeper. “If governments are still doing business with those regimes, it’s very difficult for a sports body to stand up and say, ‘No, we have better moral standards than you and therefore we’re not going to accept that’,” Cookson says.

Big-money behemoths

On the one hand, nation states’ backing of teams can establish long-term financial security, better wages and increased performance. On the other, this investment relies on governments whose interest in the sport is principally motivated by reputational return. Saudi Arabia has scaled back its sports investment recently, and the teams sponsored by AlUla reportedly came within days of closure at the end of the 2025 season before last-gasp talks with PIF decision-makers. A year on, the story has repeated itself: Jayco AlUla and Liv AlUla Jayco missed the UCI’s October registration deadline for 2027 amid changes of ownership and sponsorship, with founder Gerry Ryan stepping back to a minority stake.

The war involving Iran, which a US-Iran ceasefire agreement signed in June failed to end, is also causing economic uncertainty in the Middle East, with Bahrain Victorious riders and staff having their wages delayed by two weeks in March following Iranian strikes on Bahrain’s oil refinery complex.

The vast sums of money invested by the UAE to create the world’s best team has transformed the men’s sport. The team’s budget is reported to be surging above €60m per year. Among competitors, even fellow ‘superteams’ have a 10–20% deficit to make up, and must do so through investment by large corporations such as Red Bull, Lidl and Decathlon. The modern reality is that to compete, or perhaps even to survive, WorldTour teams must gain comparable sponsorship to stay in touch. No longer can a team exist on the support of one medium-sized investor, meaning continual hand-to-mouth instability for smaller outfits.

“A lot of money has been added, especially from the Middle East. As a result, some budgets have exploded,” Picnic-PostNL boss Iwan Spekenbrink told Wielerflits earlier this year. “It is extreme what some of these young boys are being paid. [Smaller teams] are in effect competing with entire countries, where the financial possibilities sometimes seem endless.”

Spekenbrink’s own team illustrates the point. Picnic-PostNL was the only men’s WorldTour squad granted just a one-year licence for 2026, with any extension conditional on meeting financial criteria, and it too missed October’s registration deadline for 2027.

As teams at the top take the spoils from ever-expanding budgets, the others are left with little hope of catching up. A structural gulf has emerged between the types of money flooding the sport. Traditional corporate sponsors invest in cycling to sell products, boost brand awareness and satisfy shareholders. State sponsors, by contrast, are buying geopolitical soft power and diplomatic legitimacy.

The road ahead

As cycling leans further into its relationship with nation states, the time is ripe for ethical, reputational and financial reflection on whether this is the path the sport should continue down – if it is not already too deeply committed. Severing ties with nation-state investment would remove hundreds of millions of euros in annual financing from the sport. A more practical goal in mitigating nation-state impact may be to objectively assess how political forces are exerting influence on cycling from financial, reputational and ethical standpoints – instead of pretending that these forces don’t exist – and impose limiting measures.

Cookson has suggested that the UCI introduce a rule banning the names of nation states from appearing in team names, dampening the reputational benefit of sponsorships and reducing the potential for conflict. Other suggested measures include a budget cap, although this may be unworkable in a sport that straddles the globe, and a fit-and-proper person test, similar to that which is imposed in English football – itself awash with Gulf State money. The remaining option is to do nothing. But failure to wrestle with the risks of nation-state influence could result in the further laundering of cycling’s image, a wider chasm between state-backed and smaller teams, and yet more instances like the 2025 Vuelta where geopolitics overwhelms our sport.

Contracts vs convictions

“Just by wearing the flag, that’s not in and of itself sportswashing if [riders] are at the same time talking about UAE crimes in Sudan or domestically. But I haven’t seen any such statements,” says Joey Shea, a researcher at Human Rights Watch.

One rider who did signal his convictions was Canadian star Derek Gee-West, after he dramatically exited from his Israel-Premier Tech contract at the end of summer 2025. He explained that his decision related to a “personal-belief standpoint” that “weighed heavily on my conscience” – though he did not explicitly cite the war in Gaza.

Speaking to Cycling Weekly, one agent described riders “becoming picky” over which teams they sign for. For example, one female rider was unwilling to sign for UAE Team ADQ (as it was known then) due to the state of women’s rights in the country. Conversely, another agent said that the “majority of riders are not thinking about politics. They are bike riders, not political activists.”

This article was first published in the 18 June 2026 print edition of Cycling Weekly magazine – available to buy on the newsstand every Thursday (UK only) while digital versions are available on Apple News and Readly. Subscriptions through Magazine's Direct.