João Almeida shrugs off internal dispute: "I also told Juan Ayuso to go solo"

João Almeida started today's stage of the Volta a Catalunya but was the target of a GC raid. UAE Team Emirates were attacked hard early in the day, and the Portuguese lost his lead as Richard Carapaz and Sergio Higuita took time on the peloton.

He explained: “I started the first climb too far from behind. That is cycling, you sometimes make mistakes. It was a tough day. We expected it to be a difficult stage, it was a dangerous one. But of course we did not expect the attack from both of them."

In an unexpected turn of events the opening climb of the day - Coll de les Llebres Mussera - was explosively attacked. Almeida found himself dropped off the GC group, and unable to respond to the South American duo when they attacked towards the win. Despite having connected with teammates Marc Soler and Juan Ayuso, they were unable to keep the gap as Soler took up most of the work in the group.

He struggled in the descents, most noticeably in the final descent where he couldn't keep up with some of the riders who had moved off the front: “Maybe I had a little too much air in my tires, so I slipped a bit in the corners... That's why I also told Juan Ayuso to go solo, because he rode good descents. In the end it worked, because he was in the first group, while I was in the second. As a result, the other riders also had to do work.”

“In the end it wasn't all that bad. In a sense, I think we made the day. It makes sense that we had to do the work, we had the leader's jersey. And we have a good team. If I was with another team, I would have left it up to our team," he concluded. He'll go into the final stage into Barcelona tomorrow in third place, and will be in the battle to defend his podium position, whilst at the same try to recover what he's lost today.