On the eve of the 2024 UCI Road World Championships, Zürich's newspaper of record, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, detected a certain ambivalence among inhabitants towards the event after a summer when the city had already ground to a halt for a series of concerts and festivals.
"Street Parade, Taylor Swift, Cycling World Championships – is there too much spectacle in Zürich?" read the headline. Green party councillor Urs Riklin didn't entirely disagree. "If necessary, I'm happy to put the brakes on the fun," he said, the kind of line that surely only a politician from the sober city of high finance would ever dare to put on the record.
