A NATION STARTS OUT
Israel Start-Up Nation’s debut at the Tour de France this year marks a major breakthrough for cycling in the country. Procycling looks at what it means
hen the Tour de France begins on August 29, history will be made as the Israel Start-Up Nation team line up for stage
1 in Nice and become the first Israeli team to ever appear in the Tour, with the race’s first ever Israeli rider among them. For a team that only launched five years ago, it will be the crowning moment of a rapid elevation to the biggest stage in the sport. “The dream of competing in the Tour de France, almost unthinkable only five years ago when we launched the team, is now coming true,” said co-owner Sylvan Adams at the squad’s 2020 team presentation in December.
Every team comes into cycling with big ambitions. Yet for every MTN-Qhubeka or Bora Argon, there’s an Aqua Blue Sport or One Pro Cycling, squads who made a lot of noise when they started out but who didn’t last more than a few seasons when they encountered the inevitable hurdles. Even Vital Concept-B&B Hotels, the high profile French ProConti squad who launched in 2018 with the sole aim of racing the Tour, have had to wait three years before being handed their race debut this year.
“One reason is the ambition of both the owners and the team management. If that’s not there, you’re bound to fail,” Israel’s general manager Kjell Carlström tells Procycling of why this team has proved successful. “The passion and the fact that we’re not only a team. We’re so much more than that. It’s really a project. We always strive forward all the time and try to think out of the box other than just saying, okay we did it like this 20 years ago, so you will continue doing it like that.
“That’s really our DNA… we have always tried to punch above our weight and it’s something I believe I have helped with in this process.”
The history of Israel in men’s professional road cycling is so short it’s almost non-existent, which makes this breakthrough even more stark. Prior to the 2010s only one rider ever reached the top ranks of the men’s sport, Yehuda Gershoni, who rode for the Skil-Reydal team alongside Sean Kelly in 1984. It wasn’t until 2012 when Ran Margaliot was signed by Saxo-Bank in the WorldTour, that another Israeli followed in Gershoni’s footsteps. Margaliot, a former Israeli national champion, grew up racing bikes in the hills around Jerusalem before moving to Europe to race as a junior. He was picked up as a stagiaire for Saxo Bank in 2011 before being offered a full-time contract, and suddenly his dream of racing the Tour seemed a real possibility in his future.
But Margaliot raced just 26 days for the Danish squad that year, with eight races resulting in a DNF. Team boss Bjarne Riis did not want to re-sign him, and after just one year in the top flight, aged only 24, Margaliot retired.
Yet while Margaliot couldn’t make it to the Tour himself, he channelled his efforts into helping another Israeli rider do so. After meeting businessman Israeli Ron Baron, the team was formed and in late 2014, the Cycling Academy launched as a Continental squad in Jerusalem with six home riders on their roster, all under the age of 25.
Still, it wasn’t until two years later that seismic change came, thanks to Canadian billionaire Adams, a property businessman and Masters-level cyclist who had recently emigrated to Israel. Adams had the enthusiasm, cultural roots in the country and importantly the deep pockets to back the team’s expansion and by 2017, they were moving up to ProConti level with a boosted roster. It was then that Carlström, a Finnish former pro who rode for Liquigas and Sky during his career, was also recruited.
“Ran talked about the tradition of the team and how that was getting an Israeli rider to the Tour. He had never done it as a rider - he wanted to provide such an opportunity to future Israelis,” says Carlström. “I thought that was a nice idea. But the project is so much more than that and inspires people to ride and build bridges.
“I felt that I could be a key player in building such a culture and progress in the team and that’s something that I think that’s always been valuable, to be part of building something new that you can put a little bit of your touch on.”
MOVING ON UP
Money makes the cycling world go around, and Adams’ arrival has undoubtedly wielded the team power. Adams was instrumental in bringing the Giro d’Italia grande partenza to Israel in 2018, a huge logistical, financial and organisational feat, that placed the home Israel team centre stage as a wildcard squad at their grand tour debut. It also announced Israel to the cycling world. Last autumn, Adams then oversaw a takeover of the Katusha-Alpecin team, which eventually came with a move up
to the WorldTour, and crucially a guaranteed Tour spot. Then this summer we got the biggest indicator yet of how high Israel Start-Up Nation’s ambitions are set, following the announcement that Chris Froome would be joining the team next year. Froome’s signed on what is thought to be a very long-term deal, with the intention to win even more grand tours.
How, then, does a team that has grown from a development squad into WorldTour heavyweights in just five years ensure that its original ethos, to develop Israeli cycling talent, doesn’t get lost, the bigger the team grows? MTN-Qhubeka started out, don’t forget, as ‘Africa’s team’ but the number of riders from the continent has notably dropped since Dimension Data, and now NTT, took over as title sponsors and they joined the WorldTour. This year, only seven of their 29 riders are African, a decrease of 50 per cent from 2015.
Carlström points to the Israel Cycling Academy Continental team, which relaunched this year, as proof that the team’s roots are not lost. Half of its 16 riders are Israeli, and the idea is for it to provide a stepping stone to the WorldTour team. “We felt it was the correct moment to start a Continental team again,” he says. “That’s where we can really foster the talent coming from
Israel and abroad and make sure there is a real path that you can take that you can get up to the WorldTour.”
It’s notable that Carlström refers to Israel Start-Up as a “project”, not a team and their website boasts multiple social campaigns they’re aligned with. Margaliot now oversees the Israel Cycling Center, an organisation that helps young people in Israel ride bikes - as of 2019 they were running eight programmes at youth villages around the country. The team’s name change this year refers to their partnership with Start-Up Nation Central, an independent non-profit described as “building bridges to Israeli innovation”. Riders are referred to as ‘peace ambassadors’, a title written across the shoulders of their jerseys in line with the country’s Peres Center, which is said to promote “shared living between all of Israel’s citizens and lasting peace between Israel and its neighbours”.
The team is also the most multicultural of any WorldTour squad, with 16 nationalities among its 30 riders. What then is its identity?
“There has always been an Israeli identity which reflects the diversity of people living in Israel and it doesn’t really matter from where you come, you can still coexist and work together. Over the years we have always had a lot of different nationalities and cultures in our team and I have always thought that that is a strength and not a burden,” Carlström says. “There are so many opinions about how things could be run, or how we should behave, now everybody has to take consideration if you have different views. We deliver the team and how we believe it is right and to really respect everybody there no matter where you come from.”
Still, it’s impossible to ignore the criticisms of sportswashing that have been directed towards Israel since its investment in cycling began. Human rights groups have accused the country of trying to divert attention to positive news away from the Israel-Palestine conflict and the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, and RCS’s decision to award Israel the Giro start in 2018, in particular, was hugely controversial. Amnesty International refers to Israel in 2019 as having “continued to impose institutionalised discrimination against Palestinians living under its rule in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories”. B’Tselem, the Israeli centre for human rights in the occupied territories, says that 3,529 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces in occupied territories between 2009 and 2020, while 130 Israeli security forces and civilians have been killed by Palestinians. It is difficult to separate sport from politics when the team is named Israel Start-Up Nation, yet Carlström, as Adams has previously, says that the team is “not in politics.” He says: “It’s about showing that we can coexist together, we can build… it doesn’t matter where you are from.”
Carlström says in the few short years he’s been with the team, there’s been growth in Israel in how many people are aware of cycling. The team hopes that will increase when they make their debut on television around the world at the Tour. Israel Start-Up clearly don’t want to just be another team in the Tour peloton, though. They want to be the team to beat in years to come, and in signing Froome they show that. But building a Tour winning team is more than just signing one rider and typically not a quick process - see BahrainMcLaren’s efforts to win a grand tour title in recent years. Froome’s arrival alone won’t guarantee a yellow jersey.
“The initial dream was to have an Israeli cyclist at the Tour but now the whole team is there, it is absolutely huge and that means we have been able to achieve that in these years,” Carlström says. “It's a long-term project, it’s something we see as a stepping stone for what we want to do and what we want to achieve in the future.”
"The initial dream was to have an Israeli cyclist at the Tour, but now the whole team is there, it is absolutely huge... It's a long- term project, it's something we see as a stepping stone" Kjell Carlström