With exactly 200 days to go until the 101st edition of the Tour de France gets under way in Yorkshire, cycling fans are being invited to register their interest in tickets for the presentation in Leeds next July of the teams competing in the race.
With Team Sky’s Chris Froome the defending champion, and Omega Pharma-Quick Step’s Mark Cavendish aiming to become the first wearer of the yellow jersey next year, there’s likely to be plenty of interest among British fans to attend.
The presentation will take place on Thursday 3 July in the First Direct Arena, says Le Tour Yorkshire, and there is a form on its website that you can fill in to be the first to know when the tickets go on sale.
There’s no word at the moment of how much they will cost nor how many will be available.
The £60 million venue, owned by Leeds City Council, hosted its first event in July this year when Bruce Springsteen played there and has a capacity of 13,500 although it’s likely a chunk of that will go to invited guests and the media.
While the team presentation at this year’s Tour de France at the harbour of Porto-Vecchio on Corsica was free, as was the one in London’s Trafalgar Square the last time the race visited Great Britain in 2007, there are precedents for the event to be ticketed.
Largely that depends on the type of venue where it is held; in 2011, for example, tickets were sold for the presentation in the replica Gallo-Roman arena at the Puy du Fou theme park in France’s Vendée region in front of a crowd numbering in excess of 7,000.
Born in Scotland, Simon moved to London aged seven and now lives in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds with his miniature schnauzer, Elodie. He fell in love with cycling one Saturday morning in 1994 while living in Italy when Milan-San Remo went past his front door. A daily cycle commuter in London back before riding to work started to boom, he's been news editor at road.cc since 2009. Handily for work, he speaks French and Italian. He doesn't get to ride his Colnago as often as he'd like, and freely admits he's much more adept at cooking than fettling with bikes.