YORKSHIRE could be forgiven for being a little taken aback at what it’s just achieved.

Its welcome for the world’s biggest annual sporting event was described as the “grandest” opening in the race’s entire history by race director Christian Prudhomme.

For two days Yorkshire’s beautiful landscape and passion was beamed out to a global audience of an estimated 3.5bn people and – depending on who you ask – enjoyed by crowds of between 2.5m and 5m spectators lining the Tour de France route.

Its humour and creativity literally leapt off the hillsides; images of alpacas and sheep dyed tour colours, dales buildings in polka dots and hoards of spectators dominated social media and the newsstands.

Gary Verity, chief executive of Welcome to Yorkshire who is responsible for bringing the race to Yorkshire, anticipated it would bring £100m to the Yorkshire economy – a figure he now thinks may be conservative.

It was initially his aim to make the region a global cycling centre; already he has helped securing a new major cycling event next year. The Tour of Yorkshire will be another collaboration between Welcome to Yorkshire, British Cycling and ASO through what Christian Prudhomme called “this new land of cycling”.

In York, the city council’s chief executive, Kersten England, said they will now work to make sure cycling stays at the top of the agenda in the city.

“We should see a five-year uplift in tourism following the event – which is fantastic – but the real legacy will be about an increase in participation in seeing more people cycling more often across the region,” she said.

“Cycle Yorkshire is a partnership of the region’s local authorities working with Welcome to Yorkshire and other cycling, support and educational organisations to make sure we’re building on the momentum of this event to do just that over the next ten years.”

Susan Briggs, head of the Dales Tourism Business Network, said the Tour has had an indisputably positive impact for the Yorkshire Dales, but said now is not the time for its businesses to rest on their laurels if they want to reap the benefits.

“There’s massive amounts of goodwill towards Yorkshire and the Yorkshire Dales now and we’ve got over that first barrier of making people aware,” she said.

“But now we have to do now is take very specific action and get people to make bookings and spend money. That only happens if you do really targeted, specific work to push people into that next step.”

She said it would be a mistake to purely focus on attracting cyclists.

“Cyclists tend to whizz through. We want less fit visitors; the ones that stop off at the pub and come with some friends, walk around enjoying the scenery and stay in a B&B a few nights.”

It has also turned Yorkshire into a recognisable brand worldwide; good news for many companies making recognisably Yorkshire products.

Taylors of Harrogate – the makers of Yorkshire Tea – handed out 500,000 special edition tour-themed packs of tea to the waiting crowds in three days.

John Sutcliffe, from the company, said the global reach of the tour will spread awareness of its brand amongst consumers worldwide.

“The impact through social media we got was huge; we got a lot of feedback over the weekend with people Tweeting pictures and putting images on Facebook.”

Jo Theakston, sales and marketing director at the Black Sheep Brewery in Masham said: “The immediate economic benefits are definitely there; we had however many people in Yorkshire over the weekend.

“The key thing is the amount of people who watched it further afield, who may never have heard of Yorkshire before.

Particularly Europeans who may visit London, but now may also jump on a train or get in a car and drive up to Yorkshire.”

There may be more benefits from the powerful PR the Tour de France has secured for Yorkshire.

Yorkshire, like the rest of the North, is used to reading about itself from the perspective of a London-centric media, or politicians who believe Northerners spend their lives shuffling around former coalfields in bemusement.

But the Yorkshire that was beamed around the world was confident, optimistic and at DARLINGTON & STOCKTON TIMES WEEKEND dst.co.uk FRIDAY, JULY 18, 2014 35 ease with itself.

It has led to renewed calls for more devolution of power to the Northern regions. Some commentators have said this image of a confident, independent nation illustrates why the North should be given more autonomy.

Guardian commentator Martin Wainwright wrote in his blog how those images chimed in with a series of calls from political parties to create more powerful city regions.

He wrote: “Their seizure and confident handling of the main chance coincides with a series of declarations from political parties about the need to let England’s regions off the metropolitan leash.”

But it’s not all about the money.

Gary Verity said: “Undoubtedly, it will give a huge boost to the Yorkshire economy but it’s the images of Yorkshire people, Yorkshire pride and Yorkshire’s outstanding landscapes beamed around the world which have been simply priceless for the county.”