THERE have been plenty of third party reflections on the 10th anniversary of the Grand Depart of the Tour de France in Yorkshire but the one thing missing from them all are words from the man himself.
I went up to the Yorkshire Dales farmhouse which is home to Sir Gary Verity to speak to the former chief executive of Welcome to Yorkshire who masterminded the event.
Hailed by many, including TdF organiser ASO, as the “grandest of Grand Departs” in its 121-year history and the biggest occasion that has ever happened in Yorkshire, you would struggle to find anyone in the region who could not tell you where they were and what they were doing that weekend back in early July 2014.
I have known Gary since the early 2000s when he was a top business turnaround executive.
But it was his 11 years at the helm of what was a sleepy, uninspiring body called the Yorkshire Tourist Board which he transformed into Welcome to Yorkshire that defined his reputation as a man who could put Yorkshire on the world stage.
Sir Gary has turned down many opportunities for interviews to mark this historic occasion and has kept a relatively low public profile since he resigned from his role at Welcome to Yorkshire in March 2019 on health grounds, which the organisation said was not directly linked to concerns raised “in relation to his behaviour towards staff and his expenses”.
He didn’t break any rules, but I’ve seen politicians, business people, media and sports personalities and even criminals who have had an easier ride from the media.
His is a story worth hearing.
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ON a sunny summer Sunday afternoon high up in the Yorkshire Dales as a chorus of curlews punctuate our conversation, I sat down with Gary to ask about his reflections on 10 years since he brought the Tour de France to Yorkshire.
You haven’t spoken to any media about the 10th anniversary of the TdF in Yorkshire, is that because of how it ended with Welcome to Yorkshire?
“Maybe. Because from my point of view I had a nervous breakdown and had poor mental health and I don’t really want to go back to that dark place where I was.”
I suggested to Gary that the media, particularly locally, had been pretty cruel.
“Other people have said that as well. Those were the same media that did very well out of the Tour de France so there is an element of hypocrisy there.
“Clickbaits combined with petty jealousies and conflicts of interest is a toxic cocktail.
“The Australians have a name for it and they call it Tall Poppy Syndrome.”
Memories of the event
I asked Gary what his most vivid memory of the event was.
“Maybe the whole thing. It’s pretty intense when you’re responsible for the whole thing. If it goes pear shaped it’s your fault. You are the one in front of the media explaining…”
Was there ever a moment he thought it wouldn’t work?
“No…the team had done so much work and we’d done that much planning and preparation and multi-agency working with local authorities who stepped up to the plate particularly well.
“Everybody really got behind it and there was a huge amount of work being done like that.
“ASO [who organise the TdF] are brilliant, Christian Prudhomme and his team bring this fantastic event. All you have to do basically is provide the roads!
“I remember at the time, the French were a bit sort of overcome by the numbers involved.”
It was estimated that 2.2 million people lined the roads of Yorkshire on each of the two days of the event.
“Christian got a lot of questions in France about why on earth are you taking the Tour to Yorkshire and he was able to answer them very easily on the evening of the first stage he said: ‘Now you see why’.
“Bernard Hinault is a Breton – as hard as nails, the last Frenchman to win the Tour de France – he said to me and he’s not a man that gives out compliments, in 40 years with the Tour de France both as a rider and as a commentator he’d never seen anything like it anywhere.”
He remembers that the positive tone for the whole week was set when the French arrived at Leeds Bradford Airport.
“As they came through the terminal, the band of the Yorkshire Regiment were playing On Ilkley Moor Bar t’At and then they segwayed into La Marseillaise!”
On the race itself, Gary recalls: “We knew you couldn’t win the Tour de France in Yorkshire, but we knew you could lose it. And so it turned out to be.
“Coming into Sheffield, Christopher Froome couldn’t keep up with Vincenzo Nibali.
“The winner of the Tour de France that year was Vincenzo Nibali: made in Yorkshire.”
What was the secret behind winning the bid for the TdF?
“I said to Christian at the start, if you are kind enough to lend me your race for three days I will give you the grandest ever Grand Depart in the history of the Tour de France and that was what we had to live up to.
“I was always confident that we had all the ingredients to do a successful event and in fact it was Christian who said you have all the ingredients, we just need to learn to make a meal together!
“I felt the way that people had got behind it, the level of organisation, support from all of the other agencies, you could see with all of the bunting and flags and yellow bikes, that Yorkshire had gone crazy for the Tour.”
I asked how he got Yorkshire to believe in and buy into his vision.
“Just communication. I think you’ve got to be very strong on communication at all levels. I’m not talking about press releases but sessions with charity groups, sporting associations, business associations, Round Tables, Rotary, Women’s Institutes, all over everywhere and they’re not glamorous, you know, on a wet February evening, standing up in front of crowds of anything between 30 to 150 people.”
Where did the idea for the TdF in Yorkshire come from?
“I was fortunate enough to be the chairman of the Olympics for Yorkshire. I could see that the London Games in 2012 were going to be enormous.
“I was worried that we were going to miss out in Yorkshire. I don’t mean for the 2012 Games because there were many benefits for Yorkshire businesses and clearly a lot of benefits for Yorkshire athletes.
“But…I could see that the London Games was going to be a huge success, and money was no object for it.
“There was also a lot of talk at the time about an independence referendum in Scotland, which did subsequently happen. And my thought was, well, our Scottish friends will be given more money to keep the union.
“London and the South East will have an economic boom on the back of the Olympic Games, which happened. We will be the forgotten wasteland in the middle.
“This was before [former Chancellor George] Osborne’s catchphrase of the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ or the other catchphrase of’ levelling up’ or any of these other sorts of things. And so I thought, well we really need a big event to put Yorkshire on the map.
“But of course that’s where the conundrum starts. What can you do? What could you create?
“The biggest event in the world is the Olympic Games.
“Well I think the chances of that happening in Yorkshire in my lifetime are zero. The next biggest event in the world is the FIFA World Cup. You can’t even get a Premier League football team in Leeds.
“And the third biggest event in the world is the Tour de France and it’s the largest annual sporting event. And then the more you think about the Tour de France you think it’s a natural fit with Yorkshire because we have a big cycling heritage.
“And so I was shaving one morning in early 2010 and I thought; ‘That’s it, the Tour de France’.”
How difficult was the challenge of trying to bring the TdF to Yorkshire?
After making contact with TdF organiser ASO he was invited to Paris for a lunch meeting.
“I thought, well, that means one of two things. Either they haven’t got any friends to have lunch with, or they’re interested.”
Things progressed and Gary says Yorkshire was put at the bottom of the very long list of prospective places across Europe that wanted to host the start of the race.
He remembers the challenge facing him.
“They’d never heard of Yorkshire. So we had to set about explaining.
“We tried them with everything, David Hockney, the Bronte sisters and everybody to do with Yorkshire or anything from Yorkshire – Percy Shaw, the man that invented Cat’s Eyes, Harry Brearley, who invented stainless steel, Captain Cook, the man who did more to discover the known world in peacetime than any other man in history.
“Whatever we kept coming up with, they had not heard of them. And then in one meeting, one of our French friends turned to me and said: ‘Are you the dog? Le petit chien c’est toi?’
“I didn’t know what he was talking about!
“He said: ‘The Yorkshire’.
“We call it a Yorkshire Terrier. In France, it’s just called a Yorkshire. And it’s the most popular small dog in France.
“And I said, yeah, that’s us. And he said, oh, we know Yorkshire, of course.
“And all they knew us for was this little yapping dog that was bred to catch rats in mills. All the great things Yorkshire’s given to the world! But it was something.”
But Yorkshire was still on a long list of bidders, including another from Scotland which had been backed financially by the UK government.
“The game changer for us…was when they visited Yorkshire in May 2012.
“I said, we have to get this right. This is the moment, we have absolutely got to shine. If we nail this, we’ll be home and dry.
“But if we screw this up, we can’t ask them to come back again.
“I believe when you’re running any organisation, whether it’s in the private sector or the public sector, or it’s a sporting organisation, it’s all about the detail.
“Then it’s about the detail of the detail.
“Then it’s about the detail of the detail of the detail. And often people glaze over at that point, like, ‘Oh, this is boring. He’s just talking all this stuff again’.
“Actually, it’s not boring. If you want to be successful, particularly in something that’s the biggest sporting event in the world every year, that is a huge prize. So absolutely, it’s all about that level of detail.
“And they came for just under two days. But we did an awful lot of work to make sure that everything was totally, totally bob on.
“I went to Eurostar to make sure that they were welcomed on the tannoy.
“We borrowed Lawrence Tomlinson’s [the Yorkshire entrepreneur who runs LNT Group] helicopter.
“And I personally briefed the pilot as to which route I wanted to take so they flew over the factories of the West Midlands and then swung up over the Pennines above Sheffield, up the spine of the country, so they could see the race route…up Wharfedale and then come down Coverdale and land here at the farm.
“And I mowed in the front field a giant Y for the helicopter.
“We had thought long and hard about the choreography of the whole thing and said, look, he’s (Christian Prudhomme) going to be fed up of meetings in airport hotels, let’s do it here [at Gary’s sheep farm].
“There was a huge link between the Tour de France and agriculture. The French equivalent to the National Farmers Union has been involved in the Tour for many years.
“It’s no coincidence that the Tour really doesn’t get blocked by angry French farmers because they are their brothers in arms. The Tour promotes their produce as it’s going through the area.
“So hence, holding the meeting on a farm makes a lot of sense. And when they arrived, it was a lovely day, we had drinks on the lawn
“I didn’t talk about cycling for the first hour. I just showed them around the farm, showed them the animals, and they loved it.
“And then we had lunch at the kitchen table, all from Yorkshire, made by one of our friends who was a Michelin star chef.
“Christian said to me: ‘This food is amazing, it’s better than we eat in France. Why is the reputation of British food so bad in France?’
“I said, because I’m not responsible for the reputation of British food in France!
“And then I gave him a book with a letter signed by every Yorkshire MP.
“It was very important to have cross-party support.
“We had two cars provided by JCT600 and drove them around parts of the route – we covered up the sign in Middleham that says it is twinned with Agincourt!
“We flew them to the coast and then back over York and landed at Harewood House, where we had a big dinner, with everybody, chief executives with local authorities, and chiefs of police, and fire, and Brian Robinson [the first Briton to win a TdF stage] – just to say, this is not just me that wants the Tour, this is Team Yorkshire that wants the Tour.
“David Lascelles, the Earl of Harewood, was a wonderful host. And then we went back to Swinton Park, and the next day, we went into Leeds, and met Tom Riordan and the leader of the council because we said, Leeds will be the HQ for this thing, and they are basically our financial backers on this, they are underwriting this. And that went very, very well.
“It suddenly got very serious.
“[Our campaign] was ‘Back le Bid’ for 2016.
“Christian said to me: ‘It is better for me if you don’t talk about a year, just talk about Back le Bid.
“I looked into his eyes and I thought, somebody’s dropped out. And it was Barcelona that dropped out for 2014.
Reflections and reactions
I ask Gary if there is a bittersweet feeling about all the energy and enthusiasm that went into bringing the TdF to Yorkshire and then creating its legacy event, The Tour de Yorkshire which is no longer running.
“Yes, but you don’t want to spend life thinking about what could have been. I’ve had lots of people stop me in the street, strangers who said: ‘Can we shake your hand and thank you for what you did’..
“Even now that happens. I’ve not had one person stop me and say anything bad, negative or rude. Only kind things and positive things.
“In terms of the legacy, we did have a great race with the Tour de Yorkshire.
“It could still be going. It should still be going. That’s one of those things in life.
“I was very, very pleased about what we did for women’s sport. We were the first organisers of any sporting event in the world to do the same prize money for the women as the men.
“The route was identical for the men and the women. A number of the top female cyclists, Sarah Storey and others, said to me: ‘Give us a tough course’.
“So that’s what we did. And exactly the same media coverage as the male race, live on ITV, on terrestrial television, from start to finish. And that took a lot of fighting for. It shamed a lot of other organisers in sport to have to pay the same for women…and I think that’s really important.
“It’s easy to beat yourself up and think, you know, should we have done this? Should we do that? All of us do, but actually, you know what, sometimes just have a cup of coffee and say that was all right.”
And, looking back, does he have a sense of pride about what was achieved?
“It was my job.”
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At the end of our interview, I asked Gary whether there was anything we hadn’t covered, anything left unsaid?
He paused for some time, looked out thoughtfully across the fields where his sheep were grazing and replied: “I think it was a… good thing.”
That’s the understatement of the decade.
Have a great weekend.
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