Cycling, bread and circuses? When Le Tour came to Yorkshire and what it left behind

In the summer of 2014, there was no way of getting away from it: Le Tour de France was coming to Yorkshire. The message from tourism was that this was great for Yorkshire because businesses would be making money; politicians were also telling local people to feel happy that they had won the right to host Le Tour. In this paper, I will reflect on what happened when Le Tour came to Yorkshire through an analysis of newspaper reports, photographs taken by myself two years on from the two days Le Tour arrived in Yorkshire, and an auto-ethnographic account of what it was like to be there. I will argue that Le Tour allowed local communities to embrace a cosmopolitan European identity alongside their existing northern English or Yorkshire identities, and that the race itself allowed spectators to be proud about the northern English landscape through which the cyclists battled.

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