Adam de Vos began with dreams of glory in the pool.
He is instead achieving them on the road, sans Speedos.
The former swimmer with the Oak Bay Orcas, who didn’t begin cycling until age 17 with the Tripleshot club of Victoria, won the Tour de Delta on Sunday.
The emerging Island rider captured what is considered British Columbia’s most prestigious road race by churning through the 155 kilometres in three hours, 30 minutes, 12 seconds.
De Vos said he switched sports because cycling provided more “fun and variety.”
He certainly got both. It’s fun to win. And de Vos has seen plenty of variety on roads from Delta to Metchosin, the latter where the 24-year-old Rally team pro won the 2017 Robert Cameron Law Series road race, to the North American elite-level Tour of California.
The dream is to race for Canada on the Olympic roads of Tokyo in 2020 and Paris in 2024 and the roads of Europe as a professional rider. The latter continues next month when de Vos and his Rally teammates contest the Tour of Denmark, Arctic Tour of Norway, Deutschland Tour and single-day pro races in the Netherlands.
The last of those takes the Islander to his ancestral homeland. The Dutch word for fox is vos, so de Vos sports a tattoo of a fox chasing a rabbit. That’s because in racing and life, you are always chasing down something, and it helps to be smart like a fox.
All roads for this fox led home this month. After winning the previous day in Delta, de Vos was back on his bike Monday doing an expansive training ride around the Saanich Peninsula ahead of next weekend’s Tour de White Rock.
“I went out to the ferries, then out to Willis Point and back a few times,” he said.
That’s just a leisurely summer ride for him.
“I’ve done these races [Delta and White Rock] several times before with amateur teams, so it was cool to come back with a higher-level team [U.S.-based Rally] and perform the way a big team should,” said de Vos, who was ninth in the 2015 UCI U-23 world championship.
“These [B.C. events] are not the biggest races we do, but every win is super important. It’s great that Delta was a UCI points race, which carries more weight for you as a pro. We had a good group, four Rally riders, and we played the odds.”
Which is what de Vos continues planning on playing as his pro and international career progresses with hoped-for cunning and speed. Just like a fox.
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