After illness, Gee-West hits Alps with Giro in mind: 'The body's come around'

The Volta a Catalunya offered Derek Gee-West a chance to measure himself against Jonas Vingegaard ahead of the Giro d’Italia, but circumstances conspired against the Canadian champion. 

Gee-West felt surprisingly below par in the opening days, and the root cause soon revealed itself. A bout of illness forced him to abandon four stages into the race. 

“I felt quite bad in Catalunya, but the symptoms didn’t actually appear until I stopped the race,” Gee-West told Domestique in Innsbruck ahead of stage 1 of the Tour of the Alps. “I was quite sick, but luckily the body’s come around since. In the end, I was only affected for maybe just under a week.”

Although Gee-West was back in full training relatively quickly, he confessed to a degree of frustration at missing out on some valuable pre-Giro tests on the summit finishes at La Molina and Queralt. 

“It’s not so much the sickness as it is the missed race days,” Gee-West said. “Obviously you don’t get much out of a race like Catalunya if you’re not well. So that’s unfortunate, but I think the question how much it actually set me back will be pretty evident after this week.”

Twelve months ago, Gee-West’s podium finish at the Tour of the Alps prefigured a fine Giro, where he placed fourth overall, impressing at just about every turn in the road from Albania to Rome. While some Giro contenders, most notably Vingegaard, preferred not to race again after Catalunya, Gee-West is sold on the benefits of lining up at the Tour of the Alps, and not simply as a means of gauging his progress in training.

“I think it also gives a chance for the legs to improve over a week of racing,” he said. “I mean, you can do as much as you want in training, but there are certain elements of racing that just aren’t replicable, whether it’s being in the peloton or just having a full day of unpredictable racing. It’s just something that I really like to do going into a big target.”

And, with that particular target in May in mind, Gee-West is reluctant to get too bogged down on his finishing position at the Tour of the Alps this week. The key, he maintained, is to see forward progress ahead of the corsa rosa.

“The goal is entirely just process-based this week,” he said. “I mean, hopefully I feel better on stage 5 than I do on stage 1. If that’s the case, then yeah, it’s trending in the right direction for the Giro.”

Gee-West has already made up for lost ground this season, of course. His fractious departure from the team formerly known as Israel-Premier Tech has been well documented, and the fall-out left him on the sidelines from last June until the until of the season. His transfer to Lidl-Trek, meanwhile, was only confirmed in mid-December, meaning that he missed his new team’s initial planning meetings and the bulk of the first training camp.

Even so, Gee-West looked to be quickly up to speed once the calendar flipped into 2026. He made his Lidl-Trek debut at the UAE Tour, where he performed solidly on a route hardly suited to his qualities as a diesel, placing seventh overall. Isaac del Toro and Remco Evenepoel generated all the headlines that week, but for Gee, it was a result that offered reassurance after a trying period that had included the stress of his former team reportedly seeking some €30 million in damages.

“I was definitely worried about the long lay-off from racing, but I think UAE was kind of the perfect race to transition back into the peloton, and it went well,” Gee-West said. “The races I did in Europe so far were affected by illness, so this feels sort of like my first race back in Europe, and hopefully we can get some good race days in.”

As well as banking racing miles, the Tour of the Alps presents Gee-West with another chance to familiarise himself with his new teammates and the rhythms of his new squad. 

At Israel-Premier Tech, Gee-West’s move into a leadership role happened organically after his break-out displays at the 2023 Giro. At Lidl-Trek, by contrast, he has been signed expressly to be one of the team’s Grand Tour leaders, but he downplayed the pressures of the role.

“It’s definitely different, but I think the pressure is balanced by having so many leaders on this team and so many different ambitions,” said Gee-West, who will split top billing at the Giro with sprinter Jonathan Milan.

“There’s obviously the sprint train and you have guys who are super competitive in the biggest one-day races, like you saw with Mattias [Skjelmose] yesterday in Amstel, so you don’t have everything behind you for this one specific goal, and that’s definitely a nice adjustment.”