TOWNS and cities across North Yorkshire are set to welcome the best of global cycling after being unveiled as host locations for the 2019 UCI Road World Championships.

The Championships, which take place in Norway this year and Austria in 2018, are heading to Yorkshire in 2019 and race start locations have been proposed in Ripon and Northallerton.

The Northern Echo:

Harrogate has been named as the main competition town where each race will finish, and additional start locations have been proposed in York, Beverley, Doncaster and Leeds.

The event in September 2019 will mean cycling on a scale never seen before in Yorkshire.

This will build even further on the county’s growing global reputation for the sport after the hosting the Grand Départ for the 2014 Tour de France and the annual legacy race the Tour de Yorkshire.

Although the race routes will not be revealed until September 2018, the start and finish locations suggest that North Yorkshire will see a large part of the action.

Gary Verity, of Welcome to Yorkshire which supported the successful host bid, said he expected people will already be attempting to ‘join the dots’ to try and work out the routes and that he fully expects towns and villages to embrace the occasion.

The Northern Echo:

“I’m sure that it will be the same reaction that the Tour de France Grand depart and the Tour de Yorkshire have received,” he said.

“This time it is the rainbow coloured jersey that cyclists are trying to win and I’m sure that Yorkshire will be dotted with the rainbow during the championships.”

The event is another feather in North Yorkshire’s cycling cap and asked whether it will firmly place the county on the world cycling map, Mr Verity said: “I think we are pretty well established on that front, but what this will do is cement Yorkshire as the European capital of cycling.”

Andrew Frame of Northallerton’s Cowley Cycles and member of the Hambleton Road Club, is pleased that the town will play its part in the event.

He said: “The World Championships is a more prestigious event for us and it is every cyclists dream to have those Championship stripes, although it isn’t as well-known in general as the Tour de France.

“So it will all depend on how well it is advertised and handled as to whether it will be as big for the area as the Tour de Yorkshire.

“But not only considering the cycling, more generally it is keeping Northallerton in the picture; we are going to be a major part of a major event so hopefully tourism more generally will benefit from that.”

Yorkshire won the right to host the event after a joint bid between Welcome to Yorkshire, British Cycling and UK Sport and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.