Heading to the finish of Vuelta a España‘s stage 21, probably the first indication that things were about to go seriously awry for the race was that the finish itself was all but impossible to reach.
“No, you can’t go down here,” one heavily armed police officer standing at a barrier in a seemingly quiet street in Madrid’s plush central district told journalists. This was despite the actual finish being barely a few hundred metres away in the Plaza de Cibeles square, on the same broad boulevard as ever. “Go round another street a bit further on.”
Having duly headed round to the next street, the same problem emerged, only this time there were three police officers manning a barrier in the middle of the road. One, seemingly at random, was taking IDs of journalists going through and one reporter bearing a TV camera came in for more intense scrutiny. In any case, the same message was barked back at the journalists – ‘Go further round, you can’t go through here.’
In this case, just a few hundred yards away from the Paseo de la Castellana boulevard where the race would end on Sunday – in theory, if not in practice – tourists were taking selfies of themselves against the backdrop of one of central Madrid’s biggest attractions, the Parque del Prado. As for police, there was just one lone local policeman handling the traffic and the scene was one where only the exceptionally warm weather seemed out of place. Then a message crackled through by chance on the policeman’s radio just when Cyclingnews was passing that made it clear something was up – ‘They’ve broken through in Callao’, a square on the far side of the usual 6.2 kilometre finishing circuit in Madrid.
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