When the Tour de France snaked up Holme Moss and the Col de Buttertubs on its two stages through Yorkshire earlier this year, Team Sky’s Geraint Thomas said the atmosphere “was like being in a disco for four hours”. For the inaugural Tour de Yorkshire next year I Do Like To be Beside the Seaside might be a more apt soundtrack, with organisers revealing on Monday that Bridlington, Scarborough and the county’s coastal roads will all feature in the three-day event.
Leeds, York, Selby and Wakefield will all also host either a stage start or finish in the race that has been introduced to capitalise on the huge success of the Tour de France in the region. More than three million people took to the streets and lanes of Yorkshire to witness the passing of the peloton and the economic benefit to the region has been estimated at £102m.
Though the full route will not be published until 21 January, exactly 100 days before the start of the race on 1 May, the plan is clearly to send the race through areas which missed out on the spectacular events of the summer.
“We wanted to make sure we took the race to parts of Yorkshire that missed out on the Tour de France and I am pleased to say that this first edition will heavily feature the Yorkshire coast,” said Gary Verity, chief executive of co-organisers Welcome to Yorkshire. “This was important for us because both ourselves and Christian Prudhomme [the Tour de France director at Amaury Sports Organisation] were disappointed we could not include the coast on the Grand Départ. We are delighted that issue can now be addressed.”
Organisers have set their sights on the race becoming “a flagship cycling event in the UK in 2015 and an outstanding cycle race in the international calendar” and as such Verity is confident that those towns and cities to miss out in the 2015 edition will have the chance to host the race in the future.
“The reality is we’re never going to satisfy everyone with every edition. There are 10,000km of roads in Yorkshire and our race will do less than 600km every year,” he said. “Simple maths says not everybody will be happy all the time but over a period of time I’m sure we will get a slice of the action to everyone that wants to take part.
“In five years’ time I think everyone who wants to be covered will have been. We were oversubscribed this year and we have already had great representations for 2016 and beyond.”
The 2015 race could potentially act as a warm-up for riders readying themselves to compete in the Giro d’Italia which starts the following weekend, although the dates of the Yorkshire event do overlap with the Tour de Romandie, an established six-stage World Tour race which was won by Sir Bradley Wiggins in 2012 and Chris Froome in 2013 and 2014.
