Completing the UK's two-wheeled annus mirabilis of Tour de France and Olympic success, it has taken just over three years for Yorkshire to win one of sport's biggest economic prizes, the Grand Départ of the Tour de France, and it has done so in the face of competition from Florence but most notably Edinburgh, which began putting itself in the frame for a possible Tour start as long ago as 2007.

Speculative contacts between Welcome to Yorkshire and the Tour organisers began in 2010, and a firm bid was put on the table only this May. That was for 2016, but the process has been accelerated thanks to Bradley Wiggins's victory in the Tour de France. With happy timing, if Wiggins sticks to the plan announced recently in his book, 2014 could be the final Tour of his career, meaning that the Yorkshire start could be a perfect swansong for him.

Detailed route plans for Yorkshire will be announced on 17 January at a joint press conference, but already there have been some hints of the organisers' thinking. "They can start in Leeds and have two or three days based there, including going into the Yorkshire dales, or go from York up across the North Yorkshire moors to Scarborough," the Welcome to Yorkshire chief executive, Gary Verity, told the Guardian soon after announcing that Yorkshire was bidding.

Yorkshire, and Leeds in particular, has a strong history of holding world-class cycling events, with the Leeds Classic and its iconic climbs of Holme Moss figuring on the World Cup schedule in the 1990s. Verity also mentioned the town of Haworth with its scenic cobbled streets and Brontë associations. It is likely that the second Yorkshire stage will finish in the south of the county, to provide a handy jumping-off point for a third stage confirmed as finishing in London. If the organisers are looking for key places to visit they could make a detour through Morley, home of the late great Beryl Burton, or nip over the Nottinghamshire border into Harworth, just south of Doncaster, home of Tom Simpson.

Speaking in June, Verity said his team had a firm arrangement in place with "a transport provider" to get the riders en route to France within an hour of the third stage finishing. A London finish could mean either Eurostar or charter flights from London City airport – the Tour organisers' preferred option is said to be air.

There have been persistent rumours that Cambridge could host the race; the university city is within easy reach of a southern Yorkshire stage finish and would provide an ideal start for a stage across East Anglia and the south-east for a central London finish.

There was considerable irony in the timing of the announcement, coming as it did less than a month after British Cycling and Event Scotland got the press together in Glasgow to announce that the British governing body would be giving its backing to the Edinburgh bid. It was clear at that meeting that there had been little communication between British Cycling and the Yorkshire organisers and the former is left with a certain amount of egg on its face.

Among the key factors in Yorkshire's favour was the declaration from the organisers that a Tour start would take place in conjunction with a 10-year programme of investment in cycling – for example a bike bank to give every Yorkshire child access to a bike – so that the race would leave a lasting legacy behind it. When the Tour visited London in 2007, the organisers were taken with the fact that the race's presence was seen as a way of promoting cycling within the capital rather than as purely an economic investment.

It is estimated that the possible economic benefit for the region if it hosted the first two stages could be £300m, a figure reached after studying the figures for the Grand Départ in London in 2007. That was reckoned to have brought in £88m across London and the south-east. With two stages across Yorkshire totalling up to 400km, plus a third stage starting just outside the area, rather than a city-centre prologue and a single road race stage, as was the case in London in 2007, that largely accounts for the increase.