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Cycling superstar Tadej Pogacar of the Team UAE Emirates will try for a fifth Tour de France title in 2026 but is more excited by the two one-day Monuments that have so far eluded him; Paris-Roubaix and Milan San Remo.The 27-year-old Slovenian was speaking Saturday at a pre-season training camp at Benidorm in Spain.“I’m going to do Strade Bianche, Milan-San Remo, the Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, the Tour de Romandie, and the Tour de France. And then we’ll see, that’s already quite a lot,” Pogacar said.“If I could choose between a win at Roubaix or the Tour, I would choose Roubaix because I have already won the Tour four times,” said Pogacar, who complained of feeling drained during the 2025 Tour.“There is a bigger difference between zero and one than between four and five,” he added.Tour de France champion in 2020, 2021, 2024 and 2025, he can join an elite clique of five-time winners alongside Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, Miguel Indurain and Jacques Anquetil next July.“The Tour de France of course is the biggest race, everybody always arrives ready, teams always send their best team and you have to be super ready,” he said.“But if I won Roubaix and San Remo, I would feel sort of complete, but there’s always something else, like The Vuelta, I haven’t won that either,” he said, while refusing to be drawn on his participation in the Spanish Tour for 2026.Team UAE also confirmed that last year’s break-out rider Isaac del Toro would also race the Tour de France.The Mexican burst on to the cycling scene last May when he came close to winning the Giro, finishing second to Simon Yates.“The team’s idea is for me to learn as much as possible alongside Tadej, whose level I want to reach one day,” said Del Toro.Pogacar spoke glowingly of Del Toro.“Maybe he’s going to be better than me one day. He has his own way, his own style, and I admire him as a a rider and a person and hope he keeps going that way.” said Pogacar 

Israel-Premier Tech have been excluded from the Giro dell'Emilia cycling race on October 4 in Italy for 'safety reasons', the organisers told AFP on Saturday.The Giro dell'Emilia, whose 2024 edition was won by cycling superstar Tadej Pogacar, will cover 199 kilometres from Mirandola to Bologna in northern Italy.The race concludes with a climb to the Madonna di San Luca sanctuary, not far from the historic centre of Bologna which has a large student population and a long history of left-wing politics.This week Bologna's local government, controlled by the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) called for Israel-Premier Tech's exclusion, citing "the Israeli government as guilty of serious crimes against the civilian population in the Gaza Strip."Roberta Li Calzi, the city's sports councillor, welcomed the decision to exclude the team."Given what is happening in Gaza it would have been hypocritical to consider the presence of a team linked to this (Israeli) government as insignificant," she said in a statement.Adriano Amici, president of GS Emilia which organises the one-day race, said the team "will unfortunately not be present at our race. We had to make this decision for reasons of public security.""There's too much danger for both the Israel Tech riders and others. The race's final circuit is run five times so the possibility of the race being disrupted is very high."It's a decision I regret having to make from a sporting perspective, but I had no other choice for public safety."The race is a ProSeries event, road cycling's second tier after the World Tour, and is a dress rehearsal for Il Lombardia, the final Monument of the year which takes place the following weekend.Four stages of this year's Vuelta, including the finale in Madrid, had to be cut short due to mass protests against Israel's continued offensive in Gaza and the participation in the event of the team, owned by Israeli-Canadian billionaire Sylvan Adams.The Premier Tech group which co-sponsors the team and is the manufacturer that supplies the riders with their bikes, wants the team to remove the world "Israel" from the name.

Cycling was licking its wounds Tuesday and wondering 'where next?' after a chaotic final day of the Vuelta a Espana which saw the concluding stage called off 50 kilometres shy of the capital and the winner crowned in a hotel car park.The three-week stage race, one of the three Grand Tours at the pinnacle of the sport, was repeatedly disrupted by pro-Palestinian demonstrators fired up by the presence in the race of the Israel Premier Tech team.A government spokesman told AFP that 100,000 people had taken part in the final-stage protests, which followed other pro-Palestinian protests during the race.The stage was stopped early. The winner Jonas Vingegaard had to make do with an improvised podium.For the International Cycling Union (UCI), the sport's governing body, and race organisers, the activists highlighted the vulnerability of races, which stretch across long distance and take place on public roads with free access for spectators.Some fear for future races, notably the 2026 Tour de France which begins with three stages on Spanish soil, starting in Barcelona."Let's hope that the conflict in Gaza is resolved by the time the Tour de France comes around," said Vuelta director Javier Guillen on Monday.It is not the first race targeted this year.In May, pro-Palestinian protesters stretched a rope across the road shortly before the finish of the 15th stage of the Giro d'Italia in Naples.In July, a man wearing a T-shirt reading "Israel out of the Tour" disrupted the finish of the 11th stage of the Tour de France in Toulouse.But these were isolated incidents, nowhere near the mass demonstrations in Spain, a country where the Palestinian cause is popular.Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who has talked of "the genocide in Gaza", even expressed "deep admiration" for the protesters and called for a sporting ban on Israel, a position which incurred the wrath of the UCI on Monday who said it "calls into question Spain's ability to host major international sporting events".There are fears within the peloton, though, that the Vuelta has set a precedent."It's clear for everyone that a cycling race can be used as an effective stage for protests and next time it will only get worse, because someone allowed it to happen and looked the other way," wrote experienced Polish rider Michal Kwiatkowski on social media on Sunday evening."It's very bad for cycling that the protesters managed to get what they wanted. We cannot pretend that nothing happened."The Tour de France, the highest profile race in the world, is an obvious target when it next July but the Israel Premier Tech team, 13th in the UCI rankings, is automatically invited to all the most prestigious races on the calendar.It dropped the word 'Israel' from its shirts during the Vuelta for several stages but categorically refused to throw in the towel.Several riders on other squads called for the withdrawal of the team which was created by Israeli-Canadian billionaire Sylvan Adams, who likes to describe himself as an ambassador for Israel.The race director also suggested that such a withdrawal would help calm the situation while adding that was a decision for the UCI."We alerted the UCI to the situation. They took a position through a statement to keep Israel PT in the race," Guillen said Tuesday.In its statement the UCI expressed its "total disapproval of and deep concern" about the events that marked this year's Vuelta, calling them a "serious violation of the Olympic Charter and the fundamental principles of sport".The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally of official figures.Israel's retaliatory campaign in Gaza has killed at least 64,905 people, also mostly civilians, according to figures from the health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.

The General Assembly of the Arab Cycling Federation (ACF) was held in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. The meeting was attended by Major General Ahmed Nasser Mustafa, head of the Arab Sports Federations Union, Engineer Abdulaziz bin Saud Al-Thani, President of the Qatar Cycling and Triathlon Federation (QCTF), and representatives from 14 Arab cycling federations. The results culminated in the election of Dr. Yasser Al-Doukhi as President of the Arab Cycling Federation (ACF). In a historic outcome, Mrs. Fatima bint Issa Al-Ghanim, representative of the QCTF, was unanimously elected as Vice President of the Board of Directors. This achievement represents a qualitative addition and support for the pioneering role of women in Arab sports leadership and also reflects the esteemed status of the QCTF. Jamal Abdulatif Al-Kuwari was elected to the Board of Directors of the ACF.