When Britons cross the Channel to watch the Tour de France, they swap sliced bread for baguettes and cornflakes for croissants. Should any French cycling fans make the reverse journey this weekend for the inaugural Tour de Yorkshire, they may encounter one of Britain’s unsung culinary delicacies: le battered sausage, dyed blue by Audrey’s chip shop in Bridlington to match the turquoise jersey of the race leader.
“It was a bit of a joke initially,” said owner James Morrison. “I just did a batch of blue fish to get in the local newspaper, but then people kept on coming in asking for them.”
Ten months after Yorkshire staged its triumphant Tour de France Grand Départ, God’s Own County is once again in the cycling spotlight. On Friday the first ever Tour de Yorkshire will start in Bridlington, taking a 174km route through the Dalby Forest and North York Moors to Scarborough. On the startline will be top riders including Britons Sir Bradley Wiggins and Ben Swift, and Germany’s Marcel Kittel, who won the first stage of the Tour de France in Harrogate last summer.
Stage two goes from Selby to York via Beverley and the magnificent Wetwang, while Sunday’s stage three starts in Wakefield and ends in Leeds. The women get a look-in on Saturday, when riders including Olympic and Paralympic stars Dame Sarah Storey and Joanna Rowsell will contest a 20km circuit around York.
Friday’s stage is arguably the toughest, taking in the lung-busting 1.5km climb out of Robin Hood’s Bay – Côte de Robin Hood’s Bay to you – which has significant sections at a 25% gradient, as well as a few other zingers. Limber Hill, which rises out of the village of Glaisdale in the North York Moors, is too short to warrant official status as a climb under rules from the UCI, cycling’s international governing body, but will test the peloton with a gradient of 33%.
“That’s exactly what I didn’t want to hear,” said Ed Clancy, double Olympic gold track medallist, who will leave his usual velodrome on Friday to ride for the JLT Condor team. Despite being from Yorkshire – he was born in Barnsley and now lives in Holmfirth – he hasn’t ridden much of the route before and is nervous: “It’s a really tough course. For a guy like me who isn’t very good at climbing, just keeping up with the peloton and making the cut-off time will be a real issue.”
Clancy said last year’s Tour de France had taught the continental riders not to dismiss Yorkshire’s lumps and bumps compared with the famous Alpine climbs: “They’ve learnt from last year that even if a stage might look quite flat on the profile, it really isn’t.” Last year’s Tour winner, Vincenzo Nibali, triumphed on stage two in Sheffield, noted Clancy, with the Yorkshire roads “setting the tone”. His money this time is on Swift, a Team Sky rider from Rotherham, who has been out sizing up the course all week.
Despite being better at going round in circles than uphill, Clancy hopes his Yorkshire upbringing will help him cope with whatever weather is thrown at the peloton. “Growing up in the grim Yorkshire weather should put me in good stead, though usually if I open my curtains and there’s sideways snow I can just go and ride on the track instead,” he said.
Whereas the route of last year’s Tour de France was marked by yellow bicycles and bunting made from knitted yellow jerseys (22,000 in the Harrogate area alone), blue and yellow bicycles mark the Tour de Yorkshire route. On Scarborough beach on Thursday, donkeys were wearing straw hats and a blue saddle square blanket embroidered with the “Yorkshire loves Le Tour” logo.
In Whitby, which is on stage one, pubs and guest houses are festooned with yellow bunting and flags bearing the white rose of Yorkshire. In the tourist information centre on Thursday, people chatted excitedly about the race . “The atmosphere is unbelievable. Everyone is just so into it,” said Alison Payne, 47, on her way to buy two Yorkshire flags.
“Everyone locally is going,” said Dan Porter, 26, a B&B owner in nearby Hinderwell. He said family members had taken time off work to go and watch. Local schools are said to be closing early, with a big screen due to be erected. Onlookers are expected to throng to the town’s Pannett Park, with its panoramic views of the route through the town.
But guest house owners said they weren’t nearly as busy as during Whitby’s annual goth weekend. Janet Ward, 59, landlady of The Florence on the route, said the race was a “fabulous advert”, but laughed when asked if she hoped national coverage of the race would lead to a spike in trade. “I don’t think I could cope with more people coming to Whitby. It’s really, really busy,” she said.
Payne agreed. “Whitby is on the map anyway. We’ve just had the goth festival which is huge. We’ve got the Abbey, St Hilda – we devised the Roman calendar you know, mate!”
But not everyone is happy. Some are moaning about the rolling road closures and others think the Tour de France was a one-off and should have been left as such. “[It] was a brilliant once-in-a-lifetime event and I went to see it,” said outdoor writer and photographer Terry Fletcher, former editor of Dalesman, Cumbria and The Countryman magazines. The Tour de Yorkshire is “just a feeble, pale imitation”.
