Sports & Politics Intersect: Protestors attempt to detour Tour de France
“It just seems to be a French cultural thing." - David Brailsford, Team Sky general manager
We're mere days away from the conclusion of the 2018 Tour de France, and you better believe the race has been fraught with calamities.
Aside from crashes and injuries, the biggest storyline to emerge from the famed race has been the tear gassing of protesting farmers — and inadvertently, the tear gassing of several cyclists — and whether police crossed a line in their approach.
The general consensus appears to be yes.
That the farmers were protesting itself is not unusual. In fact, demonstrations are considered to be as much part of the Tour de France as the yellow jersey. As the Washington Post notes, the visibility of the race gives would-be demonstrators a big audience. In this case, the farmers were protesting a reduction of funding for farm subsidies by the European Union as a result of Brexit by placing bails of hay on the road.
The police's decision to use tear gas did not go over well. At least one journalist who covers cycling deemed it to be heavy-handed, and that among the collateral damage were Team Sky members Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas, the four-time reigning champion and the current leader, respectively, only served to turn this incident into world news.
And speaking of, it hasn't been a particularly easy campaign for Team Sky riders. Since the start of the Tour de France, Chris Froome has been subjected to a barrage of insults, has been spat on and was even harassed by a police officer (albeit unknowingly). It hasn't been much better for Geraint Thomas. Team Sky is too good and too monied, and that a French rider hasn't won the Tour de France in 33 years makes them easy targets. The open animus toward his athletes has not been lost on Sir David Brailsford, Team Sky's general manager.
“It’s interesting that we’ve just done the Tour of Italy and Chris’s case was open and the Italians were fantastic, and the Spanish the same,” Brailsford noted. “It just seems to be a French cultural thing."
Brailsford eventually apologized for his statement.
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This week in sports and politics history: Atlanta rocked by bomb blast during 1996 Summer Olympics
"This is the sort of incident which can, unfortunately in our society today, happen anywhere at anytime." - Francois Carrard, the director general of the International Olympic Committee on the bombing at the 1996 Olympic Games
On July 27, 1996, a 40-pound pipe bomb went off at the Olympic Village in Atlanta, killing two people and injuring over 110 more between the blast and aftermath.
Initial reports focused on a local security guard, Richard Jewell, as a suspect. Jewell found the backpack containing the bomb just before police received a phone call warning organizers, “There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes.” Within days, the media and the public had their guilty party to pursue, only Jewell was not guilty. After having his life completely upended by both the FBI and the media, Jewell was cleared by law enforcement by October 1996 and would later go on to win settlements from CNN and NBC.
A year after the bombing, the FBI was no closer to finding its suspect, but authorities did suspect it was related to three more bombings across the South that targeted abortion clinics and a lesbian nightclub due to the nature of the devices and the grade of iron shrapnel used in each bomb.
That hunch proved correct, and it was from the final bombing federal agents were finally were able to identify a suspect: Eric Rudolph. By February 1998, Rudolph had been placed on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list, while Rudolph himself became a survivalist hiding in the woods to avoid capture, getting by on hunting, stealing from a local grainery and grabbing trash from restaurants.
It would take nearly seven years between the first bombing and his arrest by a 21-year-old rookie police officer behind a North Carolina grocery store. Two years later, in 2005, Randolph would be sentenced to multiple life terms without parole following his guilty confession.
In Randolph’s confession, he spoke at length about his feelings about abortion and homosexuality and how his bombs were in protest to legalized abortion and public-facing promiscuity between same-sex couples, and that his bombing of the 1996 Olympics was designed to “embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the word for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand.”
Just like the 1972 Olympic Games, when 11 Israelis were killed by terrorists at the Munich Games, the Atlanta games would continue after three days.
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