The 2014 Tour de France start in Yorkshire will be tougher than usual, with a straightforward first stage from Leeds to Harrogate on the opening Saturday followed by a stage from York to Sheffield which the organiser, Christian Prudhomme, compared to the Liege-Bastogne-Liege one day Classic – one of the toughest single-day events on the calendar.
Stage three takes the peloton from Cambridge to central London via Epping Forest and the Olympic Park.
As predicted when the Yorkshire start was announced, there will be no prologue time trial in the 2014 route, with a road race stage instead, which finishes, by happy coincidence, in the city where Mark Cavendish's mother resides.
After passing through the Yorkshire Dales national park, through Kettlewell, Aysgarth, Hawes and Reeth, the first stage will have a relatively flat run-in to the finish through Ripon.
Stage two has a far tougher finale, with six climbs that pepper the final 60km run-in to Sheffield. The race passes through Keighley, Haworth, Hebden Bridge, Elland and Huddersfield before Holmfirth. Further details are set to be announced on Thursday afternoon, but that points to the inclusion of the iconic climb of Holme Moss, a fixture in the Leeds Classic World Cup race in the 1990s.
The riders then transfer to Cambridge for the start of stage three, passing through Epping Forest and the London Olympic Park before a finish in central London which is understood to be on the Mall, replicating that of the Olympic road race last August.
This will be the fourth time the Tour has visited Great Britain, with the hugely successful London start in 2007 preceded by Le Tour en Angleterre in 1994, when the race ran stages from Dover to Brighton and around Portsmouth. The Tour's first trip over the Channel was in 1974 for a circuit race in Plymouth.