Dream for Swift with Tour spot in support of Wiggins

The 23-year-old Rotherham rider was yesterday named in Team Sky’s nine-man squad to contest the gruelling 21-day test of endurance and skill that begins in the Vendee region of France on Saturday, July 2.

Swift has won five times around the world this year, transforming himself from a climbing specialist and strong support rider to a sprint finisher of considerable ability.

In short, he is the all-round package.

His primary job on his Tour debut will be to support Bradley Wiggins as the triple Olympic gold medallist on the track bids to become the country’s first winner of the sport’s most coveted title on the road.

But with the sprint-finishing he has shown in earning stage wins on the Tour of Australia, the Tour of California and twice in Europe, who is to say Swift will not pinch a stage on a race illuminated down the years by Lance Armstrong, Eddie Merckx and Miguel Indurain?

“Very excited to be making my Tour de France debut,” he tweeted upon the announcement of the news yesterday morning. “It’s been a lifelong dream.”

On the team’s website, he was more expansive.

“Competing in the Tour de France is what every young rider dreams of and I’m really excited about the challenge ahead,” he said.

“The team is riding well and we can’t wait to get going against the world’s best riders.”

Team Sky director Dave Brailsford, who lured Swift away from Russian outfit Team Katusha at the start of 2010, said: “I am delighted that Ben Swift will be making his Tour debut.

“He is enjoying a breakthrough season with five wins already and he will absolutely thrive on this opportunity to test himself on the biggest stage of all.”

The focus will be on Wiggins, who matched Robert Millar’s 25-year best of a fourth-place finish in 2009, only to fall to 24th last year after Sky’s single-minded approach to the race backfired.

But with Swift and fellow Briton Geraint Thomas joined by Edvald Boasson Hagen, Juan Antonio Flecha, Simon Gerrans, Rigoberto Uran, Xabier Zandio and Christian Knees, Wiggins is confident he has the strongest support riders on which to launch his challenge.

Wiggins intends to ride his own race, at his own pace and by minimising losses, rather than chase the explosive riders on the Pyrenean peaks and Alpine ascents where the Tour is won. That means the 31-year-old is unlikely to be seen challenging Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck in the mountains next month, where Swift’s own ambitions of finishing the race will be given their sternest test.

Swift shot to prominence in 2007 when he won the King of the Mountains jersey in the Tour of Britain.

Barloworld and then Team Katusha offered him his route into professional road racing, and he finished third on a stage of the Giro d’Italia for the Russian team in 2009, having represented Great Britain in the Olympic road race in Beijing in 2008.

But the chance to work alongside Brailsford in the Sky operation was too much to resist for a young man who grew up in Anston and learned to ride in the Pennines.

His rise to Tour de France reckoning sees him join an elite group of Yorkshireman to have contested cycling’s biggest race.

Sheffield’s Malcolm Elliott rode and completed the Tour de France on both occasions he attempted it, in 1987 and 1988.

Mirfield’s Brian Robinson was the first Briton to complete and win a stage on the Tour and Wakefield’s Barry Hoban was the last of his countrymen to win two successive stages of the Tour de France before Mark Cavendish took that record in 2008. Hoban won eight stages of the Tour and holds the record for the most Tours completed by a Briton; 11 out of the 12 he raced between 1965 and 1968.

Perhaps the most famous is Doncaster’s Tommy Simpson, a former road race world champion who died on the slopes of Mont Ventoux on the 13th stage of the 1967 Tour de France.

Swift’s selection continues the feelgood factor for Yorkshire cycling.

The county is home to an Olympic champion in Ed Clancy, a world champion in Lizzie Armitstead and one of the rising stars of British road racing, Scott Thwaites, a 21-year-old from Burley-in-Wharfedale, who won Wednesday’s MAS Design Consultants Otley Grand Prix.

The organisers of the grand prix hope next year’s renewal will also count as the National Championships, a distinction which has in recent years been enjoyed by another Yorkshire town, Beverley.

“We’d like to get it back and to do so we have to ensure we put on a good show with the Otley Races,” said event organiser Giles Pidcock, who revealed that it costs Otley Cycle Club £30,000 a year through sponsorship to host a meet that nets the local community far more in return.

The county’s tourism board, Welcome to Yorkshire, are also in advanced talks with Tour de France organisers to bring the Grand Depart of the 2016 race to the county, a coup that could net the region tens of millions of pounds.

And before luch today, four semi-professional riders including Kevin Dawson and John Tanner, and four businessmen from the Strategic Team Group in Castleford, are expected to win and break the record in the prestigious Race Across America, a 3,050-mile non-stop journey from California to Maryland.