Is this the end for Gulf investment in cycling? Not necessarily, argues our professor on speed dial.
Cor Vos
So, a couple of months ago we put a call out to our listeners to share their own personal fields of expertise in the knowledge that we could politely call them to step up to the plate at some future time. For one member who is a politics professor with a primary focus on the Middle East, their time has come.
It’s been two months since the USA and Israel launched its war on Iran, and in the meantime many people have been killed and the whole world continues to brace for the expected global economic shock.
So, to pass the time before even more bad things happen, we got in touch with an expert to try and find out what all the chaos and destruction means for our small, luxuriously superfluous sanctuary of professional bike racing.
Opinion: The Iran war might be bad news for Tadej Pogačar’s team
The most dominant team in pro cycling runs on UAE money. What happens if that’s threatened?
Nathaniel Shils is a Middle East expert and visiting assistant professor at Amherst College’s political science department, and an Escape Collective member. He kindly leant some time to answer our questions via email about what the wider ramifications of the war could mean for our sport.
Jonny Long: How much of a problem is the Iran war for the continued funding of teams, most importantly UAE Team Emirates-XRG, the biggest and currently best team out there?
Nathaniel Shils: It’s hard to answer this question with any confidence until we see the full extent of the costs that this war imposes on the Gulf. One of the few certainties is that reconstruction will be expensive and defense spending is going to increase rapidly in every Gulf state. How much depends on the trajectory of the war and whether its outcome is a stable regional security architecture or a condition of prolonged instability. In either scenario, the question for us is how these raised costs will impact spending on sports.
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