João Almeida: "My goal has always been to leave Portugal as soon as possible. There's too much chaos"

João Almeida has been in the World Tour peloton for four years. He went full throttle in his debut year, when he took part for the first time in a Grand Tour, the Giro d'Italia, wearing the leader's jersey for 15 days. He tells of how that was his goal, and he did not want to have a career in Portugal.

The following year everyone wondered if he could do it again and he did. Admittedly, he had a bad day right at the start of the race and then lost time on another stage where he had to lift his foot to help Remco Evenepoel, who would later drop out, and the young Portuguese ended up finishing the Giro in a magnificent sixth place in the general classification, which attracted the attention of other teams. With UAE-Team Emirates taking the lead and signing him for five years as you can read in a recent interview with roleur.cc: "After my first year I had doubts about whether I would be a GC racer. The following year things went well again, despite a bad day which is part of the game sometimes, and then I could feel that yes, I really was a Grand Tour racer."

In his first two seasons with the UAE team, Almeida returned to the Giro twice more, abandoning with Covid before the 18th stage in 2022, when he was fourth overall, and then taking the podium with a third place in 2023. In that same period, he also finished fifth and ninth in the Vuelta a España. Despite his impressive and admirable consistency in three-week races, and a five-year contract, Almeida is still not talked about as a favorite for a Grand Tour, much to blame for his somewhat conservative racing style.

"I know, I'm aware of it, but I still don't feel that I'm at my peak and I feel that I still have something to develop and evolve. I don't know how much, and if it will be enough to win a Grand Tour, but I'm relaxed about it. If I don't believe I can do it, I never will. And I believe I can do it. Maybe some people will be surprised, others not so much."

Almeida has an enormous conviction: "I like to feel the evolution, to see the numbers progress," he says. "You have to have a strong mentality to be a cyclist, you don't get tired of weighing your food, you have to be super professional at 200% all the time. I can only see myself being a cyclist. There's only cycling in my head."

This year he won't be taking part in the Giro and will be doing the Tour de France for the first time, alongside Tadej Pogacar, Juan Ayuso, Adam Yates, he points to who will be the team leader and what his role will be, "If I have to pull for Tadej, I'll do it with a smile on my face. It will be a pleasure to race for him. He's number one, the strongest rider in the whole World Tour peloton."

João Almeida is currently one of the stars of cycling in Portugal, but has never raced for a Portuguese team and says he's disconnected from the national cycling scene. "There's a lot of chaos," he admits, in a reference to the seemingly cyclical repetition of domestic doping scandals. "Fortunately, when I was in the junior teams, I had coaches with a good mentality and my goal was always to leave Portugal as soon as possible. And that's what I did after my last season as a junior. I think I've made a name for myself outside Portugal, people know me from the World Tour. Even though I'm Portuguese, my career doesn't put me in that situation. But for young Portuguese riders, maybe it's a problem to always be associated with these cases, with this chaos."

Article written by Carlos Silva.