The men’s 2027 Tour de France starts in Edinburgh on Friday 2 July and the usual team presentations take place at 6.30pm on the evening of the Wednesday, before the race heads out for Carlisle.
The team presentations will be held at Edinburgh Castle and are slated to take 90 minutes. But whereas the last three team presentations were free to attend, this time there’s a charge, starting at £27 and rising to £99 for the best seats on the castle esplanade. Tickets go on sale tomorrow (Friday) at noon.
If you want to see the riders, but don’t intend to fork out £27, the teams will ride to the presentation along the Royal Mile from Holyrood Palace, where you can attend free of charge and without needing a ticket.
The presentations are rolled into a display co-ordinated by the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, so you do get a bit of value-add for the ticket price. The main Tattoo takes place over three weeks in August and ticket prices start at around £40 and head up to £450 or more, so the Grand Départ tickets could in theory be something of a bargain.
The venue is relatively small too, with a total seating capacity of just over 8,000 for the main Tattoo performances.
£65m cost for the two UK Grands Départs
The economics of the Tour de France – and indeed professional road racing in general – are complex, with few opportunities for the Tour’s organisers, ASO, to monetise in-person attendance. Instead, revenues stem mainly from the sale of television rights, with a global audience claimed at 3.5 billion, and from sponsorship rights. The Tour caravan is another money-making enterprise for ASO.
There’s a further fee paid by the towns and cities that host stage starts and finishes, which in 2023 an ASO spokesman reported to be €90,000 and €130,000 respectively.
Hosting a Grand Départ is a lot pricier and guarantees three days of coverage for the host region. It’s estimated that the six days of racing in the UK across the 2027 Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes will cost £65m, with central government footing £32m of the bill.
The 2024 Grand Départ from Florence, Italy, was reported to have cost the city €3 million, while last time the Tour was in the UK in 2014, Welcome to Yorkshire was reported to have paid £4.2 million to ASO, with additional costs such as road repair and security increasing the estimated total bill to £29.4m.
Hosting regions reckon the cost of the Grand Départ is worth it though. Florence estimated a net benefit of €20m from the 2024 Grand Départ, from accommodation and general expenses for those directly involved in the race.
The estimated benefit to the UK regions hosting the three UK stages of the 2014 race was even greater at £128m.
The race has even been credited with reducing the drift to the far right in French towns through which it passes.
