Tour de France chief Christian Prudhomme wants race back in Britain 'where there is passion for cycling'

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Tour de France chief Christian Prudhomme says he’d love to return to London
AFP/Getty Images

Christian Prudhomme reaches for three well-thumbed books on the Tour de France from the shelves of his Paris office as if to highlight his long-lasting passion for the race.

“These are my books, not those of the Tour,” he says. “I would read them in the bedroom I shared with my brother.”

Prudhomme still has the capacity to talk about the Tour like the excitable seven-year-old who first watched the race near Geneva in 1968. He has been interlinked with the Tour ever since: as a fan, then a commentator for French radio and television and, for the past 10 years, as race director.

Under his watch, the Tour has increasingly become infiltrated by a British influence. His first as race director featured the Grand Depart in London in 2007; the following year, Mark Cavendish sealed the first of his 30 stage wins; in four of the past five years the Tour winner has hailed from Britain; and there has also been the resounding success of the Tour’s visit to Yorkshire.

Prudhomme would like the race to return to both London and Yorkshire and dialogue on that is ongoing. Mayor of London Sadiq Khan is infinitely more responsive to the Tour than Boris Johnson, who decided two years ago it “was not worth it” for London to host this year’s race. Instead, on Saturday, the peloton will ride out from Dusseldorf.

Prudhomme, who seems every part an Anglophile, despite insisting on speaking through a translator, says: “We’re always very proud when cities like London want to welcome the Tour de France and we’ve seen in England how cycling has developed in the professional peloton and elsewhere. We’re always very open when there’s the possibility to go back to those cities but there’s no specific calendar.”

Any sense the recent spate of terror attacks might scupper such a return are brushed aside.

“No, no, no, no, no,” says the 56-year-old emphatically. “You could say the same thing about France, which has had its problems, but we’d have every confidence. In 2007, I was very impressed that two years before the city had been victims of the bombs on the subway of London and, despite that, it was a massive party and such a joy at the start of the Tour. They carried on living.”

But it is to Yorkshire to which Prudhomme’s heart leans more. At the time of the Tour’s arrival there he made it clear it was a case of “when, not if” the race was staged there again .

And while he does not say so implicitly, his tight bond with Welcome to Yorkshire chief executive Gary Verity puts the county in a strong position for inclusion on the calendar in due course.

Prudhomme will host Verity, tellingly the first person to contact the Tour boss at the time of the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, in Nuit-Saint-Georges for the Stage Seven finish, in the heart of wine country. “And red wine is very good for Gary Verity!” says Prudhomme, his booming laugh regularly punctuating the conversation.

At the time of Yorkshire’s role in the 2014 Tour, then Prime Minister David Cameron sent Prudhomme a letter of congratulations.

“The day [then French president] Francois Hollande was on the Tour, I showed him the letter from David Cameron and he told me, ‘I can assure you, we don’t get that very often’.” Again, that booming laugh. “So, we will go back to Britain.”

Even without a wheel touching down on British soil, Prudhomme is all too aware the race may yet again be influenced by the nation via Chris Froome and Team Sky, and he embraces it.

“The dream of mine is to develop cycling internationally,” he says. “You want even more nationalities in the peloton. We had the Colombians in the Eighties and the Brits in 2012 and on, the hope for the future riders from Africa and China.

Impressed: Christian Prudhomme loves the way Britain embraced the Tour
Getty Images

“We want to go where there is passion for cycling and that is in Britain. In 2014, we had planned for the Grand Depart in Florence, but then there was 2012 with Bradley Wiggins ringing the bell at the Olympic Games in the yellow jersey. We needed to embrace that fervour.”

Since then, Sky and Froome have dominated the Tour, although Prudhomme says he has no idea whether the British rider can make it win No4 after a lacklustre Criterium du Dauphine.

“If you’d asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said he’s the clear favourite, but he’s not at the same high level he was in the past,” he adds. “There are many contenders for victory. Five or six riders are at the same level, so tactics will play a big part. It’s down to who takes the initiative.”

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