Defending Tour de France champion Chris Froome is feeling the pressure ahead of the start of the biggest cycle race on the planet on Saturday in Leeds.
Froome was peerless last year in winning his first Grand Tour ahead of Colombian debutant Nairo Quintana, who will not race the Grand Boucle this year.
But ahead of the this year's 'Grand Depart' in his home country, the Kenyan-born 29-year-old Team Sky rider admitted things feel different.
"There definitely is an increase in pressure element coming back as defending champion, given that we're starting on home soil," said Froome.
"We've got huge crowds out here but I think it's all very warm, positive energy for us. We couldn't be asking for much more as a team, starting in that way and giving us that launch pad going into the Tour de France."
This year's race is widely expected to be a straight shoot-out between Froome and Spanish former two-time winner Alberto Contador.
Froome agrees that the Tinkoff-Saxo rider, who was fourth last year, is the man to watch but insists that others could also challenge.
"His run-up to the Tour de France has certainly been a lot smoother, he's managed to get a lot more results in early season than he did last year.
"As with a lot of my main rivals and the main contenders here, everyone seems to have upped their game .. and it's going to be a battle all the way to the end."
Meanwhile, Yorkshire will outdo London as a Tour de France departure venue according to sprint king Mark Cavendish said on Thursday.
The former world champion is hoping to win the opening stage which ends in Harrogate, where his mother was born, and pull on the yellow jersey for the first time.
But the 29-year-old, who has already won 25 stages at the Tour since claiming four in his second Tour appearance in 2008, said it would be wrong to get fixated on that stage alone.
"The first days are in Yorkshire, the first race finishes in my mother's home town, it's really exciting but the Tour de France is 21 days long and it doesn't finish after we leave Yorkshire," he said.
Team Sky have won the race the last two years, first with Bradley Wiggins in 2012 and then Froome 12 months later.
Team principal Dave Brailsford said that won't make it any easier to win this year, though.
"It's a different challenge every year and so the nature of the course, the nature of the route, how many time-trials, how many hilltop finishes, cobbles, no cobbles, team time-trials, no team time-trial, etc, etc, makes it a different challenge every year," Brailsford said.
The cobbles in particular have got many people excited about the fifth stage that borrows some of the famous Paris-Roubaix course.
That is a potential pitfall where the Tour could be lost, although not won.
The difference is likely to be made in the mountains or the penultimate stage 54km time trial.
There are five summit finishes over six mountain stages while another five other hilly stages could see time won or lost.
The Tour won't just be about the racing, though, as it will pass through places such as Ypres, Belgium, and Verdun, scenes of some of the worst fighting of World War I, coming 100 years after the start of the Great War and amid commemorations throughout France.
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