It was almost nothing:
two shiny eyes in a face so charming,
a bag of sweets in the early morning...
Yes, he is AWESOME!

(with reference to NOS Tourjournaal, July 19th 1989)
~*~*~*~



It was the day of l'Alpe d'Huez, but that roguish expression had convinced me long before I heard he had won the stage - or even knew who he was anyway. People tell me now: "yeah, no wonder... on that particular day in July 1989 half the country became fan of Theunisse!"
In my case, however, it was a stroke of luck, nothing more...

Nevertheless, I kept hanging on at a time when 'half of the Netherlands' dropped him as if he were dirt.


But let us start at the beginning, this site is after all about the career of Gert-Jan, which started even before I was born.


Youth - a promising lad

In 1975 Gert-Jan is one of the young riders escorting another champion during his celebration (can’t find him? click on the picture and he will be reveiled), yet in the following years (photo: 1978) he himself can be found regularly on the ‘scaffold of honour’, too...
~

For both photos I’d like to express my gratitude to Wim de Laat, who was allowed to copy –for me???- several pictures from the album of Gert-Jan’s Dad. There are a couple more, but since they need digital editing first, it might take a while before they are published here. To both gentleman, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your kindness!


Amateurs - waiting-room for a contract with a professional team


Professionals - an upward career


Together with Pedro Delgado in the Tour of 1988
 What would a tribute to a professional cycle racer be without an overview of all the successes he has achieved? Correct! And it’s about time to something about that now.
I do have a mega-file ready in spreadsheet format with really every information one could think of in regards to the results of the races which Gert-Jan has participated in. Such as the length of the race, the category of competition and the time between winner and Gert-Jan’s finishing. One day it’s going to happen that I manage to make something beautiful out of it and publish it on the web.

Until then, here you’ll find unfortunately only a synopsis of Gert-Jan’s best results and it is very likely that these lists are rather incomplete; especially the early amateur-races and the latest MTB-results are on my wishlist.

           

Thanks to the always further development of IT and the existence of websites such as youtube it is now even possible to watch again the moving images of Gert-Jan's most famous win - l'Alpe d'Huez, 1989:


When in 1992 the Tour de France called at Valkenburg, I was lucky enough to be in a position to take this picture while he rode by. For a long time I believed that that seemed to be as close as I could get. Recently, however, I had the chance to meet Gert-Jan!!! Details about the encounter can be found at this link


* Climbed to great heights;
* Cycled through deep valleys;
* Honoured, reviled, forgotten;
* Fallen a thousand times...
* ...and gotten up again!

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© 2005 Christina