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London to Paris (via Hotchillee)Brexit blamed as London-Paris organisers say next year’s edition will be the last
Next year’s 20th anniversary edition of London-Paris, the three-day ride that features on many cyclists’ bucket list, will be the last in the current format, with organisers blaming the decision in large part on increased costs and logistical headaches in the wake of Brexit.
On the event’s website, organisers Hotchillee invite would-be participants to join them “one more time” next June for the iconic event, which covers 520km between the British and French capitals.
While other organised London to Paris rides are available, and many people choose to cycle the route independently, what has set the Hotchillee event apart over the years are its sheer scale – 350 cyclists, supported by more than 100 event crew, are expected next year – as well as the availability of rolling road closures on the French leg and a police motorbike escort into Paris.
In recent years, the status of the event has also been enhanced by Hotchillee’s partnership with ASO, with the event finishing the day before the Tour de France’s traditional Champs-Elysees finish, although that will not be the case next year with the Grand Tour finishing in Nice as Paris prepares to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
And while organisers cite issues such as problems securing road closures and the event’s carbon footprint as also being factors behind the decision to bring it to an end, it seems clear that the red tape that impacts movement of goods and people between the UK and the EU – a problem also highlighted by British musicians who now have to account for all their equipment when heading to the continent on tour – is the primary stumbling block, and one that proves insurmountable.
According to Cyclingnews.com, organisers say that the total value of bikes used by people participating in the event last year was £1.7 million, and due to customs changes following Brexit, a carnet for the entire fleet has to be completed to avoid import duties from being applied to each individual bicycle.
No such paperwork was required while the UK remained within the customs union, and the additional costs – plus the prospect of bikes being held at the border if for whatever reason the documentation was unacceptable to customs officials – mean that it is impossible for the event to continue in its current format.
In a statement on its website, Hotchillee said: “Wanting to offer a more sustainable experience for their riders, the increasing challenge of closing roads and securing permissions for race sections, combined with the ever growing complications of Brexit, Hotchillee’s 20th anniversary edition will be the last in the current format.
The company’s founder, Sven Thiele, added: “We, the organisers, crew and riders have enjoyed so many years of inspirational London-Paris experiences.
“For two decades we’ve supported riders with rolling closed roads, mechanical, medical, lead car, motorbike outrider and logistical vehicle support. In recent years we’ve been making some small but significant changes as we move toward a greener future.
“We will use this as an opportunity to celebrate 20 years of a wonderful event in an exciting format that has allowed us to expand our global family far beyond what I dreamt of in the early days.”
Places for the event, costing from £1,950 and including three nights’ 3- or 4-star accommodation, are available through the Hotchillee website, and the company says that it will continue to offer the Gravel version of the ride, the route of which mainly comprises off-road sections, and takes place next year from 19-22 September.
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
Latest Comments
- Simon E 2 sec ago
Oh dear. A single bike in a single size in one shop is not indicative of the entire UK market for bicycles. And the slump isn't just bikes, it's...
- hawkinspeter 2 hours 52 min ago
Ridiculed or is it just jealousy?
- belugabob 3 hours 3 min ago
I had to double-take the headline... https://www.kentonline.co.uk/sandwich/news/takeaway-driver-19-who-left-e...
- Rendel Harris 3 hours 18 min ago
Thank goodness for that. I don't suppose anyone would want you to. You certainly behave like one though.
- Eton Rifle 3 hours 26 min ago
You do see some utterly ridiculous examples of car use....
- Eton Rifle 3 hours 48 min ago
Exactly. Every road death is a tragedy but this is at the "twat deserved it" end of the spectrum, looking at the state of that car.
- Rendel Harris 3 hours 55 min ago
I'm not the editor of this article, nor indeed of anything on this website. One would have thought that didn't require explaining.
- Eton Rifle 3 hours 56 min ago
I think the answer is in your question. I genuinely didn't know he was married to her. It does kinda explain it. Disappointing, nevertheless.
- Daclu Trelub 8 hours 41 min ago
In a perfect world, we'd have a measure of how easily distracted someone is, as part of their driving test....
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133 comments
The India deal is apparently very close to sign off, September has been touted as a potential date for this but only time will tell.
Just as an aside, the other day you picked up on it is better to produce our own stuff (gas/oil) then transport it in due to the carbon footprint. Being as other trade deals (Aus/NZ) allowed items we already had (Beef and Lamb) to be shipped in from 12k miles away, and overall the benefits of the deal are forecast as less then 0.1% of GDP by 2035, surely the Carbon Footprint of these "benefits" are suspect.
Edit: At least we won't have Johnson screwing up benefits to the UK over an evening dinner anymore.
We're not actually self sufficient in food by a long way.
I'd agree we should aim to be as self sufficient as possible but whilst we're not we will need to import.
Long distance shipping isn't actually too carbon intensive and if the original production is low carbon then even after shipping it may still be lower carbon than a UK product.
Even with Lamb where we are technically self sufficient the seasonality of the produce means that we stil import/export through the year.
So, our wait is almost over. Just a few more months and we'll be rolling in our tangible Brexit benefits.
I'm sure whatever deal is struck will be dismissed by the hardcore Europhiles regardless but yes, hopefully significant benefits with this trade deal and hopefully announcement shortly.
Don't mistake an honest appraisal of trade deals for being purely the product of "hardcore Europhiles". I think you often make the mistake of taking the Govt. claims at face value and they most definitely hype up any slight improvement whilst dismissing the many drawbacks of any policy that they make.
The converse of that last sentence is also true for government critics of course.
It's easy to dismiss minor tweaks to existing trade deals and new deals that have large amounts of overlap with previous deals but a brand new FTA with the world's most populous country wouldn't be so easy to brush off.
I'm quite hopeful that this will be the first post Brexit blockbuster deal but only time will tell.
I'm pretty sure that government critics have no need to exaggerate the complete shit-show that is "running" the country at the moment.
Cheaper petrochemical products refined from Russian oil?
More cut-price gemstones? Cheaper generic medicines and rice might be good though.
Will it be easier for my local curry house to recruit skilled chefs? I wouldn't object to that - although I'm not personally feeling there's a shortage IIRC this is a complaint of the industry.
What might we be selling to India? Currently they still get their weapons from Russia. I'm thinking they're well supplied on the IT front also. Old ships? Perhaps we could sell them good British Assam and Darjeeling tea?
India is increasingly emerging as a manufacturing centre.
Apple have recently announced the start of some iPhone production there as an example.
An FTA would hopefully bring real reductions in the prices of such goods whilst simultaneously reducing our reliance on China.
As for what we'd sell them, the obvious thing is services, we are a world leader in service exports and as India develops further the potential market for those services is absolutely enormous.
What is classed as a world leader? Top 2, Top 10? India are currently 7th in Service Exports so there might not be as big a market for it, and surely we would be importing more from them. I'm sure a big company like Infosys for example would want to muscle in on Services in the UK, especially as Trade Deals might allow them to do so cheaper then they currently do.
Top 2.
We export half as much again as India so there is a sizeable gap.
If we can benefit from cheaper service imports as well then that's even more of a benefit.
I'm sceptical that we'll be providing many services to India. It's far more likely that they'll be providing a LOT of cut-price services to us. As I recall, one of their objectives is to get access to our IT industry so that they can directly provide lots of services (e.g. call centres, support services). The only reason that they'd be wanting to pay for expensive UK services is so that they can copy them and then undercut them.
Call centres will be almost entirely replaced by AI within the next few years likewise a lot of other support roles.
Look at the job cuts planned at BT as an example of what's coming down the line.
We have world leading legal and financial services both sectors would benefit enormously from access to one of the world's fastest growing economies.
If Indian firms can provide services to UK consumers at lower costs then that is a benefit of free trade.
Strange that you think that low skill call centres will be replaced by AI and yet the far more expensive legal and financial services won't be. More likely to be the other way round as that saves companies far more money.
The lower cost services are unlikely to provide any benefit to UK consumers - that will only benefit the company owners.
I'm sure some or all of the call centres will go - that's been happening for time.
I'm not with you on the other side either because those world-leading legal and financial services are generating tons of money from dodgy or frankly corrupt companies and regimes (see Private Eye ad nauseam). The AI may need lots of training to be that bent while appearing legit!
I've no doubt the same lawyers who assisted (and continue to do so) folks wishing to use SLAPP tactics, or act as fronts for Russia, or financial concerns acting to launder funds will be interested in a large market in India. I suspect they may already be actively engaged there though.
OTOH I've no idea just what *fraction* of our legal and banking sector is questionable in this way. What we do know is that some of the largest firms are "at it".
The usual process is to have experts start to provide the service and sell it to people whilst it's being run well. Then they simply move the experts to a new different service and plug the old service into an AI system so that people pay top prices for a cut-price service.
Many more regulatory hurdles to replace a lawyer with AI than to replace a call centre worker.
I think all sectors will be impacted by AI but unfortunately customer service roles will likely bear the brunt initially.
The easy way round regulatory hurdles is to get the AI to do the work and then just have a lawyer rubber stamp it. Also, there are plenty of examples of AI being used to do legal grunt work already - it's arguably easier to get AI to write a bunch of similar legal documents than it is to get an AI to answer a phone call from a member of the public. There's more cost savings to be had by replacing a team of lawyers with one (straight out of law school) lawyer that just uses AI to do all the work, than there is to replace call centre wage slaves with computers that probably cost more in electricity than the employees get.
Initially you're still going to need a highly experienced lawyer to sign AI generated stuff off as a newly qualified lawyer is likely to miss errors etc.
For large commercial deals and other similarly scaled legal services the consequences of drafting errors can easily run to multiple millions so I can't see the very expensive lawyers losing their jobs anytime soon.
AI bots are already doing customer service for a lot of firms so widespread change looks both inevitable and imminent.
Im with Rich_cb on this one. AI is an enabling tool not a replacing tool. There is no way you can trust and AI even in a simple customer service role, let alone with commercial liablity.
Now obviously there is some cross over but our best use cases are always "free up" for more important tasks + AI doublechecking.
That seems a bit optimistic that legal services will go for accuracy over profit. What'll happen is that some MBA will bring in the AI service as a huge cost cutting improvement and will move onto another company before they get hit with the consequences. I'm not really seeing that India will spend vast sums of money on financial and legal services from the UK - why wouldn't they just employ a few top people and harness their reputations to sell a much cheaper service than the UK can provide.
I suspect it would depend on the Legal business, but some Lawyer in America got ChatGPT to put his papers together and it picked out completely made up law cases. The other team raised it to the Judge that they couldn't find them and so the Judge asked the initial lawyers to trace them. That was when they admitted what they had done.
How to Use ChatGPT to Ruin Your Legal Career - YouTube
I really hope it cited the case of the twelve red-bearded dwarves and also Arkell v. Pressdram (1971).
That's almost exactly what I was thinking of. If people think that they can turn a quick profit by using AI/LLM then they'll do that and hope that they don't get caught out.
Not "world-beating", as Boris the Liar would say?
But surely this briliant free trade also means that those apparently world leading services can move abroad as well. Particularly as some of these companies' employees and contractors will be foreign nationals who may decide - or have already decided - that the UK economy is on a downward trajectory and that the growing resentment of foreigners/immigrants/refugees/non-white people since 2016 means they can take their skills (and likely superior education) with them to other countries... some of which may even be inside the EU. Sacre bleu!!
I have been told that Severn Trent Water are in the process of setting up a call centre/customer service facility in South Africa and that other firms are looking to do the same. So a good number of the employees in Shrewsbury and other STW sites can go fuck themselves while our water bills go up, and up, and up. And at the same time water quality continues to go down, and down, and down....
Aah, the wonders of privatisation and the benefits of Brexit blended into one inedible smoothie. Isn't it great!
Not sure how Brexit has made it easier to move call centres to S.Africa?
I didn't say that. Brexit has resulted in a large number of people with a non-UK passport leaving this country to work elsewhere.
Call centres for banks other large organisations were already being relocated abroad a long time before Brexit. HSBC closed my local branch many years ago so I took my account elsewhere.
I remember discussions in the early & mid-90s about contracting out my department's function (IT helpdesk, data backups etc for a high street brand) out to some supposedly 'cheaper' outfit. It failed mainly because as soon as they examined all the things we were required to do they very quickly realised that even a really skilled team, whether 100 or 1000 miles away, couldn't possibly do half of what we did. Even if their staff were paid much less (although our wages were already very low) that company would still want to make a profit and charge the business a tidy sum for the service. But if the service quality was shit (or if the contractor pulled out at any point) the company could do nothing about it because they would have lost the experienced local staff they depended on.
Executives almost always undervalue the humans they hire but they themselves (and their remuneration) do not suffer as a result of such decisions.
Been there. People cost money, get ill, have children, go on holiday, are lazy etc. Just reduce all of those "cost centres" (employ valuable consultants to do that) and presto - profits are up!
Didn't we all think that Dilbert was funny as he joked about businesses behaving like this, then realised he was writing it straight when he outed his political beliefs in the last few years.
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