Australia’s World Tour cycling team to be renamed as Saudi Arabia partnership deepens

Australia’s World Tour team, GreenEDGE Cycling, will be known as Team Jayco AlUla next year after the Royal Commission for AlUla – an arm of the Saudi Arabian government – was elevated to naming rights sponsor.

Director of the Australian Human Rights Institute, Professor Justine Nolan, told The Guardian Australia that Saudi Arabia was “openly engaging in sportswashing” and GreenEDGE was enabling it.

“Sports and human rights are intimately connected and while sports can be a force for good it can also be used as a subterfuge,” she said.

“The sponsorship announcement which noted ‘an alignment of values’ raises questions about what those values are – restrictions on free speech, discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender or religion and criminalisation of dissent? In this case, money trumps rights.”

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