As he sat down to address the media in Leeds on Thursday, Tour de France race director Christian Prudhomme used a phrase he’d perhaps never said before. “Ee bah gum,” he said with a smile, rousing a chuckle from the local Yorkshire reporters. The moment signalled Prudhomme was in a playful mood. He knew, after all, that what he was about to announce would please people.
And not just the locals. Oh no. The 2027 Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift will not be contained within these county walls. Across six days next summer, they’ll span the length of Great Britain, visiting Scotland, England and Wales, stopping in big cities like Edinburgh, Manchester and London, but also smaller towns like Welshpool in north Wales, and the Lake District’s Keswick, where barely 5,000 people live.
