Tour de France Canterbury
Tour de France Canterbury - Stage One - Sunday 8 July 2007
Canterbury is celebrating the success of the Tour de France after tens of thousands of people turned out to welcome the riders into the city.
The streets were lined with enthusiastic supporters, including local residents, tourists and Tour followers from all over the world. From early morning to late at night Canterbury had a party atmosphere, with glorious sunshine making it a perfect day for the cyclists to complete the first stage of the Tour, from London through Kent.
Canterbury City Council, which had beaten other cities to host the event, organised two weeks' worth of support events under the Tour de Fun banner, ensuring everyone could share in the fun, whether they were cycling fans or not. Businesses were busy all over the weekend bringing an economic boost to the city.
The French race organisers and riders themselves praised the arrangements in Canterbury, saying it was one of the best attended race finishes they've ever seen.
"The most people I have ever seen at a cycle race" - the words of Tour de France stage one winner Robbie McEwan.And the Tour's director, Christian Prudhomme, told Canterbury City Council representatives afterwards that it had been one of the most watched stages of the event in its history.
The city council is describing the Tour's visit to Canterbury as "better than we ever thought possible". An estimated 70,000 people packed the streets in glorious sunshine to witness one of the world's greatest sporting spectacles as the cyclists, preceded by the colourful publicity caravane, sped through the city.
More than 600 accredited journalists from television and radio stations, newspapers and magazines across the world squeezed into the official press centre in the Body and Mind sports hall at Canterbury High School.
At the Norman Castle, Dutch television channel NOS set up camp and broadcast live to an estimated audience of five million people in Holland. And in the city centre and Dane John Gardens, thousands of people enjoyed the Tour de Fun support events laid on by the city council.
Leader of Canterbury City Council, Cllr John Gilbey, said: It was just an absolutely fantastic day - better than we ever thought possible. We had visitors from across Britain and Europe, local residents turned out in their thousands and the tills of city centre businesses rang all day. It was great to see so many people having fun and enjoying what is truly a world class sporting event.The city council will now be carrying out an economic impact survey to discover how much extra business the Tour de France brought into the city over the weekend and the likely tourism benefits in the future from a global television audience of more than 100 million people.
