Coming out of the press room of stage 16 of the Vuelta a España early on Tuesday evening, one single phenomenon immediately made it clear that this was no normal day at the races: the noise.
Even from over a kilometre away from the race route, the chants of pro-Palestinian demonstrators standing on the roadside of the stage itself were plainly audible. It helped, of course, that the finale of stage 16 ran through a shallow, semi-rural valley just outside the city of Vigo, so the traffic noise was much lower than in a city.
