Tao Geoghegan-Hart earned the seal of approval from Team Sky directeur sportif Servais Knaven after recovering from a crash on Friday to finish seventh overall in the Tour de Yorkshire.

The 22-year-old first-year professional was given the responsibility of leading Sky over the three-day event in Yorkshire, culminating in a demanding finish into Fox Valley, near Sheffield, on Sunday.

Veteran Belgian Serge Pauwels, of Dimension Data, attacked with more than 10km to go to claim the stage and overall victory – the first of his career – but Geoghegan-Hart was in the second group, coming home in fifth.

That secured him seventh place overall, all the more notable given his heavy fall in the opening stage in Scarborough on Friday, and Knaven was impressed by the youngster.

The Dutchman said: “Tao finished fifth, it was a good ride. If you look at Dimension Data they had the numbers so it was really hard for Tao to know what to do. You cannot follow everything. The first attack was the right one so it’s hard to predict what will happen.

“He did really well though, with fast guys like [Brent] Bookwalter and [Jonathan] Hivert it’s hard to beat them in the sprint, but he can be happy with it.

“If you look at it they ended with six or seven riders [in the second group] and he showed he was with the best so I think that’s really good for a first-year professional in a race like this which was really hard.

“Keeping in mind his hard crash on Friday that didn’t help him for this. He had a cold coming back from the Ardennes so overall I think it’s a really good result for Tao.”

It was an entertaining final stage of the three-day race, with four short, steep climbs in the finale and Pauwels took advantage to attack from distance, eventually coming home with teammate Omar Fraile for a Dimension Data one-two.

Welcome to Yorkshire CEO Sir Gary Verity, the mastermind behind Yorkshire’s growth as a cycling hotbed, was delighted by the vast numbers of crowds on the roadside, topping one million over the three days, and he has set his sights on expanding the race for the 2018 edition.

He said: “It takes top place on the podium of the three we have done. It’s the biggest crowds we have had so far.

“They were the same size crowds we had for the Grand Départ [to the Tour de France in 2014], you saw that as you were going round, huge crowds in town after town after town.

“The race continues to grow and our ambition is to get an extra day for the race, to do four days riding, which means we can do two relatively flat stages and two hilly stages and then we can do two days for the women as well. That means we can attract the best sprinters and the best climbers.

“We’re not finished with our innovations to continue to develop the race.”

Yorkshire Bank is an Official Partner of the Tour de Yorkshire and the ground-breaking Yorkshire Bank Bike Libraries initiative. Visit www.ybonline.co.uk/tdy