What has cycling ever done for @welcome2yorks ?

You'd have to be living in a ditch, or not interested in cycling to not know that Le Tour is coming to Yorkshire - and very briefly Derbyshire - next year for the Grand Depart.
At an event yesterday, the Yorkshire Tourist Board - now called Welcome to Yorkshire for our touchy-feely age - set out the value of the event to the region in a bid to enlist support from business.

The facts are impressive and do demonstrate the value le Tour brings with it: 5000 hotel rooms each night, 2,000 journalists and a TV audience of 3 billion - 3 billion! You can't buy that sort of publicity - well, you can actually but you know what I mean.
So, if anyone ever asks you why we should have le Tour on these shores, apart from it being a brilliant spectacle, there are cold economic reasons behind it too.