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Sheffield to spend £900,000 on Tour de France stage finish

Council hopes to bring £15 million to area

The Yorkshire city of Sheffield is to spend almost £900,000 hosting the finish of the second stage of next year’s Tour de France.

But Sheffield City Council says the race will bring £15 million in direct and indirect revenue to the area’s economy, according to the BBC.

After an opening stage starting in Leeds and finishing in Harrogate on July 5, the second day of the Tour starts in York and finishes in Sheffield, nipping into the Pennines and climbing Holme Moss on the way.

Sheffield Councillor Isobel Bowler said the cost was a "one-off investment in the city".

The council’s costs to host the stage finish include a £200,000 staging fee and £215,000 to be spent on marketing.

Ms Bowler, the Labour council's cabinet member for sport and leisure, said hosting therace in Sheffield would help "tourism, inward investment and profile".

She said: "It is not about one day or even one weekend."

Sheffield City Council expects about 250,000 spectators to line the 19-mile section of the route in the city.

It said the event would bring up to "£10m of direct economic benefit and £5m of place marketing value to the city".

The council’s cabinet will consider a report to approve the funding at a meeting next Wednesday.

John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.

He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.

Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.

John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.

He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.

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badback | 10 years ago
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Hurrah. At least it's sunk in that hosting an event like this could actually bring some cash in !

About half the climbing is in the last thirty miles of the second stage so it should be a cracking finish.

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