London Withdraws From 2017 Tour De France Grand Depart Race

And in a further blow for fans of cycling in the United Kingdom, among the bids beaten off by the British capital were proposals from Edinburgh and Manchester, with the race looking likely to begin in Germany the year after next, reports BBC Sport’s Matt Slater.

The city’s mayor Boris Johnson has taken responsibility for the decision to pull out, claiming it was entirely his call and that the event does not represent value for money.

He said: “I will not waste cycling money on something that would only deliver very brief benefits”. Given how London’s decision has probably antagonised the Tour’s organisers, Britain might be facing an even longer wait than 12 years before it welcomes cycling’s premier race once more. No: “needed for safety imps [improvements]”.

“It was a multimillion-pound investment and we think that the pay-back from that for the wider benefit across Yorkshire will continue, not just from last summer to this summer, but for many years to come”. “Don’t know the details but if I had to choose, I’d spend it on infrastructure as well”, he wrote in a tweet.

He said the cost of putting together the bid was “not a significant sum”.

Millions turned out to see the race through Yorkshire and there were 40,000 alone on Holme Moss to see the world’s best cyclists make the steep climb.

He said: “We had a loss that we made on it which we regard as an investment for the wider benefit of the Yorkshire economy, that’s our job”.

“The only option would have been to take it from the budget dedicated to cycling improvements in the city, which we were not prepared to do”.

Other major failures TfL will continue to shell-out huge amounts of money for include the £60m cable vehicle project, which doesn’t even cover its running costs, and the introduction of Boris’s new “roastmaster” buses as they are unaffectionately-known, which run on diesel 90% of the time due to widespread failure of the electric batteries.

The decision not to fund the Grand Depart comes ahead of the government’s spending review, which is widely anticipated to result in funding cuts to local authorities across the country.