A British Classic

Introduction
Britain has won the Tour de France in 2012 & 2013 and the World Championships in 2011. There's also been a team since 2010 but what does Britain have to show for it? A one week stage race which is a glorified World Championship warm up race and a 200km one day race taking in the Surrey hills before a flat run back into London. It's hardly going to ignite the interests of young cycling fans. However there's reasons to feel cheery - the amusingly named Tour de Yorkshire begins this year at the start of May. Finally it seems that the British Cycling authorities have accepted that the north (the heartland of cycling) deserves a top quality race. Unfortunately, as we'll see below, they don't actually think that the huge numbers of cycling fans in Yorkshire and Lancashire will actually travel to watch a race.

If you build it......
Again, the Tour of Britain features a hill top finish - 2013 and 2014 both saw hilltop finishes with Haytor and The Tumble respectively. The last hilltop finish before that? Yep, there hasn't been one in the modern Tour of Britain. The 2004, the first and possibly best ToB, came closest to the perfect route. The highlights were stages 2 and 4 where the Peloton were treated to the climb of Holme Moss as well as numerous other classic Peak climbs, for the latter stage they had less classic climbs available but still managed to produce a steep sinewy route finishing uphill at the Celtic Manor golf resort.

The mighty Buttertubs crammed on Tour de France Saturday

The problem with hilltop finishes is that there's not many large settlements at the top of hills. If there's not a large population already at a finish then modern day cycling route designers tend to think that people won't walk or cycle the 20 or 30 minutes to be in place to watch the riders file by. If this were true then why was the Cote de Buttertubs or the Cote de Holme Moss the densest populated spots on the Tour de France route in Yorkshire? Possibly the Tour de France route full stop. You might say that Holme Moss is actually fairly easy to get too, it's situated between Sheffield, Bradford, Huddersfield, Leeds etc and it's a fairly major road. The same can't be said of Buttertubs, it's in the middle of the Dales, read: nowhere, and with road closures and traffic it must have been a nightmare to get to. But yet, the peloton faced the above crowds, hordes maybe? This proves that if you provide people with the excitement and interest of a mountain stage then people will turn up. What people want to see is riders slogging up the Col d'Izoard, sprinting up the Mur de Huy, flying down the Poggio - they don't want to watch a slight uphill finish in Stoke.

The Future
I fear that the Tour of Britain might be a lost cause. Its slot in the calendar leads it to be utilized as a World Championship warm up and so there's a limit to how difficult you can make your course and still keep the big names. This isn't the only issue however, initially the Tour of Britain was funded by development agencies and they obviously, and quite rightly, have a vested interest in the economic advantages of well populated routes. They have no interest in the quality of the racing. These development agencies then went bust in the recession and the bill reverted to the local councils and sponsor money. You might wonder why the Tour hasn't just employed a title sponsor, the reason is that they wanted security and this couldn't be guaranteed with a title sponsor. The title sponsor might run out of money and then you're left with no race. At the moment if one of the councils goes bust or decides to spend money elsewhere then the ToB can just miss that region out.
The competition comes from the fact that councils, at the absolute maximum, get to host the Tour of Britain once a year. Put yourself in the place of a member of the council - do you put your money on a sure fire stage finish in a large town that is easy for people to get too and easy to see a definite economic benefit from hosting a stage? Or, do you take a chance and stick it up the side of a desolate moor - you could end up with no one at the stage finish and a large bill. You could end up with a huge crowd who either end up in the local town anyway after/before the race or go home and decide to come back to the beautiful countryside they watched the race from at a later date.

Prudential Surrey Classic passing by Westminster

I should say, I am in no way criticizing the local councils, the fact that they provide any money to an event, that could appear to be a folly, when they have so many competing interests is brilliant. But I think there needs to be a change in how races are funded and planned in the UK.

Plan
My plan is to change the races in the UK. We don't need to have loads of races all throughout the calendar and try to overreach ourselves. We just need to improve the quality of each race. My idea is this:

Tour de Yorkshire (Start of May)
British Classic Weekend (End of May)
Prudential Surrey Classic (Start of August)
Tour of Britain (Mid September)

The British Classic Weekend would be run in a similar way to Omloop Het Nieuwsblad/KBK weekend. A harder race on the Saturday followed by an easier race in a similar place on the Sunday. Over the next few weeks I will be fleshing out the actual route designs for the Classics weekend. They aren't just a great weekend of cycling - the idea is that they can prove that moving cycling races away from the big towns and cities and out to the big hills and classic climbs is a viable way to organise a bike race. If it works here it will be almost impossible for the Tour of Britain and Tour de Yorkshire to not do this. Then we'll have three epic races in the UK, and the Surrey Classic, instead of none as we have at the moment.