Tour de France in Yorkshire, 10 years on: The memories, the audacity of it and the legacy

Chris Froome attacking Alberto Contador up Jenkin Road in the industrial heartland of Sheffield.

Teenagers hanging from street signs in packed city centres trying to get a vantage point. Grown men and women banging on the advertising boards as the peloton whirrs past creating a gust of wind so strong it’s like standing in front of a fan on full blast. Young children on the shoulders of their parents and grandparents, their faces painted, waving their flags. Why are we here again, dad? Who knows, but everyone else is and this might never happen again.

It never did, and probably won’t ever do so again, but that’s what makes it so special and looking back on it now, so memorable.

Ten years ago this weekend the Tour de France came to Yorkshire, an ‘I was there moment’ for the White Rose county.

From Leeds to Harrogate on Saturday, July 5, 2014; York to Sheffield on Sunday, July 6, the world’s greatest cycle race beat a path through Yorkshire, leaving behind five million enchanted people on the roadside, a few stray water bottles, memories to last a lifetime and fair amount of legacy, of which we’ll come to later.

It was an unparalleled moment of civic pride, uniting communities, strangers and neighbours the likes of which only a royal celebration can inspire.

It was free too. Tha din’t have to spend a penny if tha din’t want to, and Yorkshire folk like keeping their hand on their h’apenny.

And you didn’t have to be a cycling fan, either, or a sports fan for that matter, to enjoy it, although for cycling aficionados among us, the routes through the Broad Acres were fair and exacting and produced two worthy stage winners in Marcel Kittel and Vincenzo Nibali.

For as much as the Tour de France was a bike race, Yorkshire’s staging of the Grand Depart was so much more.

It was a chance to celebrate Yorkshire in all its glory, to show off our rolling hillsides like Oxenhope Moor, our idyllic towns like Haworth, our great cities like Sheffield and Leeds.

It was a love letter from God’s Own Country to the rest of world, millions tuning in from across the continents.

Looking back now it’s still hard to believe Yorkshire pulled it off.

That we did, owed much to one man, Gary Verity.

Much maligned now for the expenses and bullying scandal that brought about his demise and precipitated the collapse of the Welcome to Yorkshire tourism agency he headed up until 2019, Verity was the force of nature that brought the Tour de France to our county.

He was the visionary who came up with something bold, outrageous in the scope of its ambition to put Yorkshire on the world’s sporting map.

He had the epiphany before England hosted the Olympics, but the emotional high London 2012 created for the country accelerated his thinking.

How he managed to lure Tour de France chief Prudhomme differs depending on who tells the story, but somewhere along the way it involved a helicopter, stretch limos around Yorkshire’s heritage sites and a case of champagne.

Monsieur Prudhomme can be charismatic when he wants to be, his French accent beguiling to those held in his court, and in Verity he had met his English equivalent.

Together they were a match made in sports promotional heaven.

“Yorkshire is very sexy,” he is believed to have said as he headed back to Paris to mull over Verity’s charm offensive.

When he returned Verity laid out the red carpet and the “humongous bunting” once more; a new catchphrase was born and Yorkshire had won the right to host the Tour de France.

It came as little surprise that before, during and after the event, the oft-repeated Verity-Prudhomme line was that Yorkshire would host the “grandest Grand Depart ever”, and to all intents and purposes, we did.

Five million people are said to have lined the roadsides, support for an event never seen before outside the race’s natural French habitats.

As quickly as it came - tented villages erected in Leeds and York, sprawling cycle teams like Sky and BMC Racing taking over hotels like Rudding Park and Weetwood Hall - it was gone again.

By the early evening of Sunday, July 6, the cyclists were on their way to Cambridge for the start of stage three and the journey across the Channel, the grandstands that stood under the dominating, jet-black facade of Sheffield’s Forgemasters factory had already been disassembled, and the roads that just hours earlier were shut off to allow the world’s greatest cyclists race through, were open again to cars, buses and regular Joes.

In time, the chalk drawings on the roads would fade, but drive the two routes now and there are still relics from that memorable weekend. Yellow bikes remain on roundabouts, there is even the odd Tour de France road sign, and the Bank View Cafe in Langsett where the Peak District becomes Sheffield is still painted in the red and white to signify the race’s polka dot jersey.

In sport nowadays, legacy is almost as important as the delivery of the event itself.

In that regard, Yorkshire can hold its head up high.

Buoyed by the numbers on the roadside, the boost to the region’s economy and emboldened by the glowing references from the riders themselves, Verity convinced Prudhomme to give Yorkshire an annual race.

The ambitiously named Tour de Yorkshire began in May 2015 and grew each year to encompass a women’s race that at one point offered the richest prize money in women’s cycling, and four days of racing for the men.

It returned to some favourite haunts like Holme Moss and ventured to new areas that would become annual staples, like the seafront at Scarborough and the Cow and Calf on Ilkley Moor.

At one stage, Welcome to Yorkshire had council’s queueing up, and paying up, to host starts and finishes of stages: Settle, Bedale, Tadcaster to name but a few.

Half a decade after bringing the Tour de France to Yorkshire, Verity pulled off an even longer event, the UCI Road World Championships, nine days of racing centred around Harrogate.

He was not there to see his latest masterpiece though. The world started falling in around him in March of 2019, six months before the world championships came to town.

The sheer number of people it brought over a longer period of time, plus the damage done to The Stray in Harrogate, proved a bit of a tipping point and with Covid postponing society and finishing off a Welcome to Yorkshire that was on its knees, Yorkshire’s cycling boom was over.

But there is still a legacy, you just have to dig a little deeper.

This Sunday, for instance, a 230km Tour de France legacy ride for amateur cyclists sets out from Roundhay Park.

There are countless personal stories of inspiration, like that of Kate Auld, who worked for Welcome to Yorkshire before the Tour came to town, who remembers watching it on The Stray, being transformed by the occasion and inspired to change the course of her working life.

“I came from a family of girls who did ballet dancing growing up. Like a lot of women, I knew nothing about cycling other than my husband going out on rides and that it was just men in lycra,” says Auld, who has since launched The Personal Cyclist.

“It wasn’t until lockdown that I got the confidence to do something about it. I took a coaching bursary through British Cycling and there were hardly any women on it. So for me it’s about making cycling fun, safe and accessible for women.

“If it wasn’t for the Tour de France…”

There are more cycle lanes on our roads, not exactly a direct result of the Tour’s visit, but all part of the push towards active travel and helping the environment.

And Yorkshire folk still come out in their large numbers to support the big cycling events.

British Cycling has brought its national road championships to the region in each of the last two years, utilising our grippy terrain and punchy climbs and the challenging switchbacks of Saltburn Bank overlooking the rugged North Yorkshire coastline to decide the country’s best male and female cyclists.

The governing body even brought the Tour of Britain back to Yorkshire recently after an absence dating back further than Verity’s vision - from Redcar to Helmsley in 2022, Goole to Beverley 12 months later.

And just last week, on a scorching summer’s evening, 8,000 people watched the Otley Cycle Races.

Ten years on the memories are still vivid, burned into the mind’s eye almost as hot as the sun was on that golden weekend.

The legacy is still in action.

The Tour de France on our roads and in our communities was a weekend like no other, a party thrown by Yorkshire in which the world was invited.