Gee-West begins third week charge at Giro d'Italia: 'Good for confidence'

Derek Gee-West’s powers of endurance look to be coming to the fore as the Giro d’Italia begins its third week. After struggling on some of the earlier summit finishes, the Lidl-Trek rider produced his best climbing performance of the race so far at Carì on stage 16.

The pink jersey Jonas Vingegaard, inevitably, was in a race of his own as he soloed to his fourth stage win of the Giro, attacking with 6.6km to go. But Gee-West was, for the first time, among the best of the rest, placing fifth on the stage, 1:18 down on Vingegaard. He also gained three places on the overall standings, moving up to sixth at 7:09.

“I’m happy with the legs today. Luckily, I got a bit more cloud cover than I thought because it would have been super, super hot. But I’m really happy with the legs,” Gee-West told FloBikes at the finish in Carì. 

Gee-West was distanced from the pink jersey group with 7km remaining, but he paced himself well thereafter. He caught up to a group featuring Felix Gall (Decathlon-CMA CGM), Thymen Arensman (Netcompany-Ineo) and Jai Hindley (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) beneath the flamme rouge, and he even tried to forge clear within sight of the line.

“They’re super good at punching on the climbs and I just can’t do it,” Gee-West said. “With a k to go when I caught them, they were going easy and I knew if I kept going at that pace I'd just get dropped when they kicked again, so I tried to go. Obviously, I didn't go anywhere and then they kicked at the end… But I just have to go on like that.”

Gee-West placed fourth overall at last year’s Giro after performing strongly in the final week, and he is now back in contention to equal or better that display despite a mixed start to the race. He is 2:09 off Hindley’s fourth place and 2:33 off a podium spot, with two mammoth mountain stages to come to Piani di Pezzè and Piancavallo still to come.

“I mean it’s really good for the confidence that the legs are getting to where they need to be for especially stages 19 and 20 coming up,” Gee-West said. “Those are going to be massive, massive days, but these are really good signs.”

Gee-West was cautious, however, when asked if he could draw confidence from his track record of strong displays in the third week of his previous Grand Tour appearances.

“We’ll see,” he said. “We’ll see on 19 and 20, because maybe you feel better every day relative to the other guys, but at the same time you feel worse every day because you’re getting deeper into a Grandy… It’s really hard to know. It’s a bit of a surprise on every climb as to where I’m going to start to lose the group.”