La côte de Cray

Worth a look large

The winner of today's stage may have been Marcel Kittel, and perhaps the only loser was Mark Cavendish (and what a tragedy there had to be one at all), but the real winners today were the Yorkshire landscape, the Yorkshire people, and cycling as both a sport and a leisure activity. We put on a fantastic show. There was a sense of destiny about the weather coming good too. It was all meant to be!

I left Ilkley at 8.15am, at which time the streets were already busy with people securing the best vantage points. It was enormous fun riding the closed roads, meeting lots of friends along the way (including people I'd not seen in many years) and getting cheers from the growing crowds - and did they sure grow fast. I swept through Skipton with the centre of town already full of spectators. From there, all the way out through Rylstone, Cracoe, Thresfield, Kilnsey, Kettlewell, Buckden and Cray, people were lining the route and entering into the spirit of the day.

The nearer I got to Kidstones pass the denser the cycling traffic became, coming in all shapes and sizes, and ages. It was fantastic to see so many youngsters lapping up the atmosphere. Riding the route like this you feel very much part of the event and the whole experience. As a cyclist you are, for a day, a first class citizen as opposed to a second class one. I cycled to the top of the climb and parked my bike up. There was still two hours to go before the riders came through so I donned my fell shoes and took a run up Buckden Pike. Naturally enough, I had the summit to myself but it was still possible to hear the cheers as the Caravan passed through.

I was caught in many minds as to where to position myself on the climb but in the end I settled for a place on one of the early bends, mainly in order to get a good shot of the crowd and the extent of the scale of this event. For me, the riders pass through so quickly that this part is something of anti-climax. The real thrill is being involved in such a huge community of people sharing this experience together. It's hard to put into words but it's all about the smiles and the cheers and the camaraderie. It's simply awesome.

Parking by bike at the top of the hill was a bit of a schoolboy error - because I was then stuck behind some ten thousand cyclists all trying to get down too! It meant that I had to really put the hammer down to get back to Ilkley to see the finish of the race on TV. That was a bit of a buzz to be honest, the roads still pretty much closed to traffic and full of fellow cyclists. I made it just in time. What a day! Well played Yorkshire!!

PS Must not fail to give a mention to Jens Voight who won the King of the Mountains Jersey. He's my hero. A cyclist's cyclist.