TOUR DE YORKSHIRE SOUVENIR SPECIAL
Pictures from all four days of region’s sporting glory
FOUR YEARS have passed since the county’s staging of the Grand Depart of the Tour de France, and yet Yorkshire’s love affair with cycling shows no sign of slowing down. If anything, the romance is blossoming. The love shown by the diverse people of Yorkshire for the biggest free-to-watch sporting event the Broad Acres stages – opening their arms and their hearts on the roadsides, hillocks and natural amphitheatres of this beautiful region – is reciprocated in kind by the world’s best cyclists.
And for this fourth edition of the annual Tour de Yorkshire, there was even more. One more day of men’s racing, one more day for the women.
New territory was breached from a start in Barnsley town centre to a summit finish on the Cow and Calf, while the women’s race continues to be at the vanguard of the movement for gender equality in sport.
And how the region embraced the whole event, with the warmest of welcomes yet again. From Beverley on Thursday morning all the way through six actionpacked days of racing to the Headrow in Leeds late on Sunday afternoon, people turned out in their hundreds of thousands once again to decorate their picturesque villages, wave their White Rose flags and cheer the men and women in Lycra as fervently as they could.
No wonder the peloton loves coming here.
No wonder Mark Cavendish – one of the biggest names in cycling – hailed it as ‘making his life’ that he was able to ride the 2018 Tour de Yorkshire.
No wonder the television cameras keep finding new places they’d never seen before, new examples of land art to observe from the sky, new hamlets to focus in on and beam pictures around the world to. The Tour de Yorkshire is the biggest shop window the White Rose county gets and the dressing each year, each day, is stunning. And the really good thing is that a sporting event that unities communities and generations is only going to get bigger and better. Next year there will be four days again over the May Day weekend for the region’s annual race, but there will also be a further eight days when the true cream of global cycling descend on White Rose county for the 2019 UCI Road World Championships in September.
As if that was not enough, a return for the Grand Depart of the Tour de France is on the agenda, with Tour director Christian Prudhomme saying it is a case of ‘when not if ’ the biggest cycling event on the planet comes back to a county that embraced it so wholeheartedly four years ago.
On top of that, negotiations have begun to attract the opening stages of another grand tour, the Vuelta a Espana, to these parts.
Yorkshire really is becoming the cycling capital of Europe.
And as the last four days have shown us, Yorkshire folk and the sport of cycling just can’t get enough of each other.