A presentation was made at the current World Championships in Doha today to announce a number of upcoming UCI World Championship locations across a range of disciplines. Among the winners was Yorkshire and Great Britain, where the 2019 World Road Championships will be held.
Yorkshire was put into the official running after an announcment made by British Cycling earlier in the year, which teamed Welcome to Yorkshire up with UK Sport and British Cycling itself. The bid faced competition from rival candidates in Italy, Colombia, Germany and Canada, but after the success of the 2014 Tour de France Grand Depart, as well as subsequent events such as the Tour de Yorkshire, it was indeed Yorkshire that clinched the race to hold the championships.
Gary Verity, the Welcome to Yorkshire chief exec, has previously said that the race will visit all four regions of the county, and it has previously been reported that should the bid be successful then up to £24m of government investment would be made to the project, as well as other cycling initiatives surrounding it.
'Yorkshire has everything a bike race could wish for,' Verity said when the bid was announced. 'We can promise a gruelling but spectacular range of routes, huge crowds and the very warmest of welcomes. We are sure the world’s best riders will find our beautiful roads both challenging and exhilarating in equal measure.'
The 2017 World Championships will be held in Bergen, Norway, and the 2018 Championships in Innsbruck, Austria, before coming to the UK in 2019: A schedule, it seems, that is unlikely to be blighted by extreme heat.
Upcoming UCI World Championships announced today:
- 2017 UCI Mountain Bike Four-cross World Championships – Val di Sole, Italy
- 2018 UCI Para-cycling Road World Championships – Maniago, Italy
- 2018 and 2020 UCI Junior Track Cycling World Championships – Aigle, Switzerland
- 2018 UCI Mountain Bike Marathon World Championships – Auronzo, Italy
- 2018 UCI Indoor Cycling World Championships – Liège, Belgium
- 2019 UCI Road World Championships – Yorkshire, Great Britain
- 2019 UCI Mountain Bike (and Masters Mountain Bike) World Championships – Mont-Sainte-Anne, Canada
- 2019 UCI BMX World Championships – Heusden-Zolder, Belgium
- 2019 UCI Para-cycling Road World Championships – Emmen, the Netherlands
- 2019 UCI Gran Fondo World Championships – Poznan, Poland
- 2020 UCI Track Cycling World Championships – Berlin, Germany
- 2020 UCI BMX World Championships – Houston, USA
- 2020 UCI Para-cycling Road World Championships – Oostende, Belgium
- 2020 UCI Mountain Bike Marathon World Championships – Sakarya, Turkey