Boris: After Yorkshire, it was a no-brainer not to bring Tour de France to London

The cycling enthusiast said it was “entirely my call” to pull out of the event, adding that the £35 million cost could be better spent.

He said: “I had to take a very tough decision, obviously painful. In an ideal world, you know me, my policy is to have your cake and eat it.

“The difficulty was we had to make a choice. £35 million is an awful lot to spend on a one off event when you could put that money in to long term projects.

“What people really want is safer cycling lanes.”

He added: “For me it was a no brainer.”

He believes “most people would accept that £35 million is a lot to spend on a one off event” but denied it marked the end of big sporting events in London.

Asked why London made the initial bid for the event if the capital could not afford it, he said: “You’ve got to make some tough choices.”

Transport for London (TfL) announced yesterday that it would not host the Tour de France Grand Depart in 2017 because it did not represent value for money.

The capital was asked to host the start of the world’s most prestigious cycling race ten years on from its hugely successful staging of the tour and three years after hosting a stage finish of the 2014 edition in Leeds, which attracted massive crowds as the riders went first from Leeds to Harrogate, through the Yorkshire Dales, and then from York to Sheffield.

The report said a quarter of everyone living in the Yorkshire and the Humber region came out to watch and the Tour attracted 113,000 visitors from outside the UK, generating £33 million into the UK economy.

It also found the Grand Depart generated more than £128 million of economic benefit for the host areas overall, with £102 million for Yorkshire and £30 million for Cambridgeshire, Essex and London.

Speaking of the decision to decline hosting duties in 2017, Leon Daniels, managing director of surface transport at TfL, said hosting the events in 2007 and 2014 had been “amazing”, and that thousands of new cyclists had been inspired.

He added: “We have always said that the return of the Tour was subject to funding.

“To ensure value for money we must make difficult choices, and on this occasion we have decided that we will not be hosting the Grand Depart in 2017.”

Meanwhile, the man responsible for bringing the 2014 Tour to Yorkshire has said the event was “tremendous” value for money for the area.

Sir Gary Verity, chief executive of Welcome to Yorkshire, said the 2014 Grand Depart had long-term legacy benefits for Yorkshire and revealed he would “love” the race to return to the county by 2020.

He made no reference to yesterday’s report revealing that Welcome to Yorkshire was left with £750,000 worth of unsold merchandise after the event and £1m losses overall.The Tour de France inspired this year’s inaugural Tour de Yorkshire - an annual three-day race featuring some of the world’s top cyclists - and has boosted visitor numbers to the area by 25%.Sir Gary said: “From our point of view, it was tremendous value for money last year. The return on investment was either between five or six times, which is a pretty good return on investment I think in anybody’s books and the long-term legacy benefits for us of hosting the Tour de France are still being seen.“It was a multi-million pound investment and we think that the pay-back from that for the wider benefit across Yorkshire will continue, not just from last summer to this summer, but for many years to come.”He continued: “It’s up to Transport for London at the end of the day. They know how much money they’ve got to invest in various projects and events and so on and they’ll make their choice.“London hosts big events regularly. From our point of view, the largest annual sporting event in the world, the Tour de France coming to Yorkshire, was the biggest event we have ever done in Yorkshire by a country mile.”Sir Gary said it was “too soon” for Yorkshire to bid for the 2017 Grand Depart but he was “very excited” by the prospect of the race returning towards the end of the decade.