YORKSHIRE WORLD CHAMPS PREVIEW
With 15 races bringing together close to a thousand athletes over nine days, the Yorkshire Road World Championships will be the biggest cycling event ever to take place in Britain
Everything you need to know as road racing’s showpiece comes to the UK for the first time in a generation
For Yorkshire folk, the status of Britain’s biggest county as the world centre of almost everything is unquestioned. Yet, outside the Broad Acres, and especially on the Continent and beyond, Yorkshire owes much of its recognition to its recent embrace of professional cycling, which began with its hosting of the Tour de France’s Grand Départ in 2014, has continued with the annual Tour de Yorkshire and will be heightened still further by the running of the UCI Road World Championships in the county during the final week of September (22-29).
Since 2014, international visitor numbers have grown significantly, reaching a record 1.39 million in 2018, while Yorkshire’s tourist industry increased in size by 14 per cent between 2011 and 2018, contributing £8 billion to the local economy. Much of the credit for this is owed to Sir Gary Verity, the former head of Welcome to Yorkshire, who convinced Tour de France boss Christian Prudhomme that the county would put on the grandest Grand Départ in the race’s history. Verity proved as good as his word, to the extent that Tour owners ASO often cite Yorkshire’s hosting of the sport’s biggest race as the model for other cities and regions. With the subsequent Tour de Yorkshire, the county has repeatedly demonstrated that it has the know-how, infrastructure, commercial backing and popular support to host sporting events that reach a global audience.
The impact on cycling’s grassroots within the county is harder to quantify, but does appear to be very positive. Many cycling clubs within Yorkshire have seen a significant influx of new members, triggering a growth in the number of sportives and amateur races. Ilkley CC is a prime example of this. An old club that closed down to the lack of members, its renaissance during the past decade has seen it achieve a membership of 1400, establish an annual circuit race and a stage race and take on the organisation of the White Rose sportive.
Since 2017, three closed cycling circuits have been built, at Leeds, Wakefield and, earlier this summer, in Doncaster, and other towns in the region are drawing plans for similar venues that offer riders the chance to learn and develop racing skills in a safe, traffic-free environment. At the same time, the number of commuter journeys being made by bike is increasing in some areas, notably in West Yorkshire, where a 23km Cycle Superhighway now links Leeds and Bradford. The link, the longest-protected bike route in the country, was used for half a million trips during its first two years following its opening in July 2016, with 80 per cent of riders saying they used it between three and five times a week. A £7 million extension is currently being built that will extend the route through the centre of Leeds.
Yorkshire’s hosting of the nine-day World Road Championships should provide further evidence of cycling’s importance as a means of leisure and transport, both of which played a part in the UCI’s awarding of its blue riband event to the county in October 2016 following a bid that had been made jointly by British Cycling, UK Sport, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and Welcome to Yorkshire. The championships are being organised by Yorkshire 2019 Ltd, a subsidiary of UK Sport that is headed by Andy Hindley, a former round-the-world sailor and America’s Cup CEO.
Verity had been one of Yorkshire 2019’s directors until he was removed from the role in April following his resignation as the boss at Welcome to Yorkshire the previous month on health grounds. His decision to step down from the tourism agency came after an investigation found that he had “made errors of judgement regarding his expenses” over the previous six years. Allegations were also made about his “completely unacceptable” behaviour to Welcome to Yorkshire staff. Although the scandal briefly overshadowed the run-up to the championships, the focus quickly returned to September’s action and the riders likely to be challenging for world title success in Harrogate.
Following the example of other cities and regions that have hosted the Worlds in recent seasons, including Innsbruck-Tirol in 2018,
Yorkshire 2019 has opted for the stylish spa town of Harrogate as its hub for all of the finishes, with each race starting in a different location spread across all four counties that comprise Yorkshire. In addition, the World’s programme will feature races for every paracycling classification for the first time. Taking place soon after the 2019 Paracycling World Championships in the Netherlands, these events races kick off the action on the opening Saturday and will act as qualifiers for the 2020 Paralympic Games in Tokyo. The next day brings the first running of the team time-trial mixed relay, an intriguing event featuring national teams comprising six riders, three men riding the first 14km lap and three women racing the second.
A Race of Champions
The first half of the week is devoted to time trials for junior and under-23 men, junior women, elite women and elite men, where Britain’s 2018 Tour de France winner Geraint Thomas is likely to be among the favourites for the world champion’s rainbow jersey. The road race programme begins on the Thursday, the junior men leading off that day, followed by the junior women and under-23 men on Friday. The two headline races, for elite women and elite men, take place on the Saturday and Sunday, respectively.
For the women, victory in the world championship is the greatest prize in the sport aside from an Olympic gold medal. Since 2012, the Dutch have dominated, claiming the title four times, including last year when 2016 Olympic champion Anna van der Breggen recorded a solo success in Innsbruck. With three-time champion Marianne Vos, 2017 winner Chantal Blaak and world number one Annemiek van Vleuten all likely to feature in their unmistakeable orange colours, the Dutch will start as favourites, assuming these stars agree to ride for, rather than against, each other. Italy and Australia also have considerable strength in depth, and should provide the principal threat to the Dutch.
British hopes rest entirely on the shoulders of 2015 champion Lizzie Deignan, who will have the advantage of a whole team working for her. Hailing from Otley, just to the south of Harrogate, she will be aiming to make her local knowledge pay on a 150km course that passes through her home town and finishes in the place where she now lives when in the UK.
A Challenging Course
Yorkshire 2019 CEO Hindley rates the route as extremely tough, primarily because it features what he believes is the hardest climb that will be tackled all week, rising abruptly from the Nidderdale village of Lofthouse to the moorland above. “It’s a course that’s typical of the undulating terrain around Harrogate,” says Hindley. “The climbs aren’t that long, but they’re often very steep and there are plenty of them.” The race concludes with three laps of a circuit that also has a rolling aspect.
Triple champion Vos has described it as “a typical Worlds course”, adding that “there’s no long climb, but there’s not much chance for recovery”. That will suit the one-day Classics specialists that pack the Dutch line-up, but also plays to Deignan’s strengths. “I already know where I want to attack if I’ve got the legs, but there are so many key places. It’s a real racer’s course,” the Yorkshirewoman said, as she built up to her main goal this season.
While the Tour de France’s yellow jersey is the grail for most of the leading riders in the men’s peloton, the world champion’s rainbow bands exert a considerable pull on the one-day race specialists, including Spain’s defending champion Alejandro Valverde and his predecessor Peter Sagan, who claimed the title on three consecutive occasions and would set a new record if he were to win the race on a fourth occasion. Yet the favourite for success on the 285km course, which is right at the UCI limit in terms of distance, is France’s world number one, Julian Alaphilippe.
Winner of a host of prestigious one-day Classics, including the 300km Milan-Sanremo event that takes place in March, the 27-year-old Frenchman achieved iconic status in his home country this summer when he led the Tour de France for 14 days and only lost his grip on the title when just
two days away from the finish in Paris. That effort took a huge physical and mental toll on Alaphilippe, forcing him to cut back a post-Tour racing programme that was designed so that his form would peak for Yorkshire. An abandonment at the one-day Clásica San Sebastián a week following the Tour underlined his fatigue, but don’t count him out.
“He dreams of wearing the world champion’s jersey in the same way that he dreamed of wearing the yellow jersey,” his coach and cousin Franck Alaphilippe revealed after the Tour.
Britain’s hopes will focus on Yorkshireman Ben Swift, but other nations look more likely to provide the eventual champion, notably Belgium and the Netherlands. The former will rally behind 2016 Olympic champion Greg Van Avermaet, who was one of many riders who took the opportunity to race on the parts of the Worlds route that featured in the Tour de Yorkshire in May.
“It’s a hard course, not extremely so, but it will exact a toll towards the end,” said Van Avermaet during that race. “If it rains it will be an attritional race. But even if the weather’s fine, you’ll still have to be attentive. It has 3800 metres of vertical gain over the 290 kilometres, which means that it won’t be won by a run-of-the-mill rider.”
The Dutch will be looking to Mathieu van der Poel to carry their attack. A phenomenal all-round talent who bagged a string of major one-day victories on the road in the spring, including a stunning victory at the Amstel Gold Race. Courted by almost every leading team in the sport, van der Poel has shown he’s able to win on any kind of terrain and has no complexes when it comes to taking on the big names despite his comparative lack of road experience.
The men’s course, the longest since 1976, begins in Leeds. For the opening two thirds, it follows the route of the 2014 Grand Départ’s first stage, heading north west into the heart of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, crossing the Kidstones and Buttertubs passes to reach Swaledale. From there, the riders should turn south back towards Harrogate, climbing over Grinton Moor. However, a mid-summer flash food washed away a bridge, leaving Yorkshire 2019 with an unexpected headache. A temporary bridge is due to be erected before the race takes place, but the UCI will have to assess its viability for a peloton of up to 200 racers before the route is confirmed.
Once through Ripon and into Harrogate, the riders will face seven laps of the 14km finishing circuit before the final race up to the line just beyond the famous Betty’s Tea Rooms in the town centre. With tens of thousands of fans urging the riders on, the one certain winner will, once again, be Yorkshire, its place on the tourist map highlighted ever more clearly.