In less than two months, the Tour de France will arrive in Yorkshire for the Grand Départ. Stephen Lewis speaks to the man who made it possible
WHEN Yorkshire began to express an interest in hosting the Grand Départ of the Tour de France, the county was a rank outsider.
“We’re not sure Yorkshire is sexy,” was the message Welcome to Yorkshire boss Gary Verity got back. Two days in May 2012 changed all that.
Gary invited Christian Prudhomme, the Tour’s director general, to visit Yorkshire.
What followed was a bit of classic schmoozing.
After making sure Prudhomme and his team were “well looked after” on the way over on Eurostar, Gary borrowed a helicopter – as you do – and flew the Tour party straight to his sheep farm in Coverdale, making sure they had plenty of chance to see the sweeping Yorkshire landscape unfolding beneath them.
It was a canny move. Anyone who has ever watched TV coverage of the Tour can’t help but have noticed the luscious aerial photography showing a ribbon of cyclists threading their way through sweeping French landscapes.
Looking down out of the windows of the helicopter, Gary says the Tour team could see what a perfect fit Yorkshire was.
And he was just getting started. They had a fine lunch and drank some Yorkshire lager.
Then he showed them around the farm. After that it was back into the helicopter for a flight to Scarborough to see the Yorkshire Coast from the air. They returned via York, circling over the Minster, and headed for Harewood House, where they landed on the lawns.
An impressive delegation was waiting to meet them – Lord and Lady Harewood, the heads of the Yorkshire CBI and Institute of Directors, the chief constables of North and West Yorkshire, the heads of Yorkshire local authorities and the head of Eurostar, among others.
They were served dinner cooked by a Michelin- starred chef – and after the first course, Gary says, up popped Brian Robinson, the Yorkshireman who, in 1958, became the first Briton to win a stage of the Tour de France. It was a wonderful piece of chutzpah – and it showed Yorkshire really meant business.
The next day, the group visited York, where they took in the Minster, and walked through the city centre. Afterwards, Gary accompanied Monsieur Prudhomme back to London on the train. “At St Pancras he gave me a hug, and said ‘Yorkshire is very sexy’,” laughs Gary. It wasn’t yet a done deal. But the momentum had swung Yorkshire’s way. The contract was signed in November that year and on December 14, it was announced to the world from Paris.
Winning the right to host the 2014 Grand Départ for Yorkshire was expensive, Gary admits.
It cost “several hundred thousand pounds”.
Hosting it will cost even more: £20m by some estimates. Some sceptics may question whether that is money we can afford, but Gary is confident the benefits will vastly outweigh the cost. When London hosted the 2007 Grand Départ, the economic benefits to the capital were said to be in the order of £100m. Yorkshire will do better, he believes.
The Tour is the world’s third largest sporting event, after the Olympics and the Football World Cup. There could be 2,500 journalists from all over the world covering the event, which will be shown on live TV in 190 countries – with five hours of live TV coverage every day in the UK alone. The perception that Yorkshire is sexy is already growing, he says.
Lonely Planet recently said Yorkshire was the third best place to visit on the planet. “I’m sure that wouldn’t have happened without the Tour de France,” says Gary.
The Grand Départ itself will be a fantastic sporting spectacle – one free to enjoy by anyone standing at the roadside. It will be the kind of occasion children will remember in years to come, and say they watched with their mums and dads. And it will leave a permanent legacy: an annual three-day Yorkshire cycle race, organised by the Tour de France organisers Amaury, which will attract some of the world’s leading cyclists every year.
Then there will be the business benefits. There are still plenty of people and plenty of businesses in the UK – especially in the south – who couldn’t even point to Yorkshire on a map, says Gary. “That won’t be the case after July. They’ll be thinking ‘Yorkshire is sexy. It’s the place that did the bike race’, rather than ‘that’s where the miners used to be’.
“And they’ll be thinking, ‘If they had the Tour France there, why don’t we have our HQ there?’”
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