“I’d love to sit here and say I believed in myself before the race but I probably didn’t. If you take my results from the season before the Giro, that’s almost what I was expecting, to be a mid-pack – towards the back of the pack – kind of rider. I was hoping to just make it to Rome.”
Some people renamed this year’s Giro d’Italia the Gee-ro in his honour. Despite not taking any stage wins in the end, it was Derek Gee’s name that was trending on Twitter when the race concluded. From a relatively unknown rider at the start of the race, he became one of the Giro’s key protagonists, loved and respected by many for his boundless enthusiasm and zeal in the face of foul weather and tough mountains. People wanted Gee for interviews, for photos, for autographs. Articles were written, posts were published in admiration. For the man himself, it was all a little bit strange.
“It was a really weird experience,” Gee says, speaking from back home in Canada a few weeks after the Giro d’Italia has concluded. “Usually the only stuff that’s written about me is by a Canadian cycling outlet as they’re the only ones who want to speak to me. Just be scrolling Twitter and seeing someone’s written something about me, it was a very strange experience. At first it was like, wait a minute, that’s not how this works.”
It was on stage eight that the Italian whirlwind which has changed Gee’s life forever started to build. Finding himself in the winning breakaway on the rolling roads to Fossombrone, the Israel-Premier Tech rider finished in second place on the stage behind the Irishman Ben Healy, surprising not only himself, but fans and his own team with his performance.
“At the end of that stage, I was like, my Giro is a success. From this point on, it doesn’t matter what happens. It was my biggest result by a massive margin. It honestly felt like I had won a stage. That’s how happy I was. Especially because Ben Healy was so far up the road, it wasn’t a second place where I felt like I had lost the stage, I managed to finish in the best place that I could have,” Gee says. “After that, I assumed nothing would happen for the rest of the race.”
The 25-year-old’s assumption could not have ended up being further from the reality of the next two weeks of racing. Two days later on stage 10, Gee finished in second place once again, this time behind prolific breakaway specialist Magnus Cort. Then, on the shortened stage to Crans-Montana,…