THE routes are finalised, the road signs are going up and within the next couple of weeks, the world’s elite cyclists will begin to arrive. When it comes to next month’s Road Cycling World Championships, staged exclusively in Yorkshire, only one thing has been left to chance.
“The only thing we haven’t been able to organise is the weather,” admitted Andy Hindley, chief executive of Yorkshire 2019, the event’s organisers. “We can do all the preparation work we like, but even we can’t do anything about that.”
Less than a month to go, and for a man responsible for the smooth running of the biggest sporting event taking place in Yorkshire this year, arguably the biggest the county has ever staged, Hindley is remarkably calm.
Yorkshire’s Tour de France Grand Depart in 2014 was a game-changer when it came to the county’s relationship with cycling and its reputation for hosting global events, but it featured just two days of racing in the county with around 150 male competitors taking to the roads.
The World Championships might not boast the same level of sporting mystique as the Tour, but they are unquestionably bigger, both in terms of the breadth of the competition and the range of the elite cyclists taking part.
Staged over an eight-day period from September 21-29, the Worlds feature races for men, women, juniors and para-cyclists. They will see around 1,400 competitors from 80 different countries converge on Yorkshire, along with the assorted support teams, media, volunteers and spectators that make the event such a prestigious and high-profile occasion. The world will be watching – and Yorkshire will be in its gaze.
“People say, ‘This event will put Yorkshire on the sporting map’, but that’s rubbish,” said Hindley. “Yorkshire’s already well and truly on the sporting map, but what these Championships will do is confirm Yorkshire’s position as a wonderful place to hold world-class sporting events and make a big success of them.
“That’s one of the big aims – we want people to come and have a wonderful time whoever wins, we want to build on the legacy left by the Grand Depart and the Tour de Yorkshire to strengthen Yorkshire’s ties with cycling, and we want to show off the county to the rest of the world.
“I know people might not necessarily have heard of the World Championships in the same way that they’ve heard of the Tour de France, but the important thing to remember is that this is a championship for the whole of the World to take part in.
“The Tour is basically an elite men’s race. We’ve got those elite men here, but we’ve also got the best female cyclists in the world, the best juniors and the best para-cyclists. We’ve literally got competitors from all over the world.
“Last week, I was talking to someone who had been in a little Italian restaurant in York for the Ebor meeting. They’d got talking to the owner, who came from a tiny little village in Sardinia, and he said 20 people from his village were coming over to Yorkshire for the cycling. Some of them had never left their village before, but they wanted to see what our World Championships were like. That’s the level of global interest you’re talking about.”
The build-up to the championships has not been without its problems, most notably when this month’s devastating floods washed away some of the roads and bridges that form part of some of the race routes.
Hindley is delighted that a series of hasty repairs mean the racing will still flash through the towns and villages that were affected by the flood waters, underlining the resilience of North Yorkshire’s Dales communities.
He is also pleased that while all eight days of competition will end at a specially-constructed finishing straight in Harrogate, the routes of the various races span more than 1,200 km of Yorkshire’s roads, taking in venues as far removed as Beverley and Bedale, Leeds and Leyburn. “We wanted this to be for the whole of Yorkshire, and we’ve done what we can to try to get there,” said Hindley.
There is also every chance of some home success, with former Tour de France winner Geraint Thomas a confirmed starter in the elite men’s time trial, Yorkshire’s Ben Swift leading the home charge in the elite men’s road race and Otley’s Lizzie Deignan targeting what would be a second World title in the women’s events.
“We’re obviously neutral in all of this, but the event can only benefit from having a really strong British team featuring some household names that cycling fans will love to see racing,” said Hindley. “From a Yorkshire point of view, having either Ben or Lizzie win would really be the icing on the cake.”
That, and a bit of Yorkshire sunshine along the way.
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