João Almeida holds peloton accountable for crashes: ‘Maybe some riders need to do a course to learn cornering and descents’

The story lands in a season where Almeida has again underlined his status as one of the most consistent GC performers in the bunch. After winning Itzulia Basque Country, the Tour de Romandie and the Tour de Suisse, he was forced to leave the Tour de France after an early crash, only to come back and finish runner up to Jonas Vingegaard at the Vuelta.

Asked about the cult of being as light as possible, Almeida hardly hesitated. “Yeah, exactly. I mean, personally, I, I do not like to feel hungry, especially all the time,” he said in the Sigma Sports podcast. “So of course I need to take my diet serious. But at the same time, I mean, it is not the end of the world if you are a few grams above your weight, right?”

He explained how that approach has worked for him over the course of the year. “I went to Vuelta with, like, kilo, kilo and a half above my weight and I still managed to win on Angliru, so I think it is a good example, one of the steepest climbs where the weight is super important. But if you do not have power, you are not gonna move forward, so it is a good example.”

That pragmatic mindset carries over to how he trains and races on climbs. Asked about his habit of losing a little time at the bottom and then surging in the final kilometres, Almeida just shrugged. “In the end it is just science, the science behind the sport, right?” he said. “With lactate testing and also your feeling, you can almost know exactly how many watts you can push on the pedals for an amount of time.” 

In the past, Almeida simply could not go any faster than that, but now it has become a conscious choice. “Nowadays sometimes I just, I can follow, but I just do not follow because I do not want to, because I know they are gonna die like 2k ahead of me,” he explained. 

“So in my mind sometimes I know, like, ‘I am gonna get you back. I am pretty sure I am gonna get you back.’ Of course, if you are talking about a Tadej or Jonas, Remco, these guys, of course, do not try to do this. But in other cases I know I am coming back. So I am just saving the bullet for later.”

If his views on performance are frank, his opinions on safety in the peloton are just as direct. “So my take is that, the bikes have been faster than ever. The stress in a bunch it has been also pretty high. My opinion is that it is mainly from the riders’ attitude,” he said. 

“I think there is a lack of respect in the bunch. People do not really care if they crash, they do not really think much about safety. This is what I feel.”

From there he pushed his point further. “In my opinion, the crashes are more from the riders’ attitude and not so much from the organisations,” Almeida continued. 

“I think the faster bikes does not really mean much. I am a guy that like cars. I often go to the tracks sometimes. I ride 300 kilometres per hour sometimes. And I do not crash. I have brakes, I can brake whenever I want, you know. So if you go 70 on a road bike, you just try to brake a bit earlier, you know. And then it comes the common sense.”

He went as far as saying riders ought to do a kind of skills course: “I think it is more important nowadays maybe some riders need to do like a course, to do some cornering, some descents, so they know what they are doing. Because if you go faster, you need to have more skills as well,” he said. 

“If you have some common sense and you respect everybody, and you know, I do not want to crash anybody, I do not want to crash myself, so maybe I brake a bit early just to be safe. And then I can push after on the climb or something. But that is clearly not the mindset at the moment, but that is what I feel."

It is that same mix of honesty and heat that produced the incident with Tom Pidcock at the Vuelta, an episode that quickly did the rounds on social media. On stage 9's summit finish to Valdezcaray, cameras caught Almeida turning towards the Brit and clearly shouting something in frustration. 

For those watching from the sofa it looked like the start of a feud. In his own telling, it was a hot headed moment that cooled down quickly.

In the podcast he laughed as he revisited the moment. “Yeah. I do not think it was, it was not exactly ‘grow some balls’, but it was, it was like something really close,” he said. 

“I knew he was on the limit and I could feel it, but I am like, ‘I wanted to give maybe some that extra push.’ But he had nothing left actually. I could feel it. But no, you can always try to, you know.”

The tension did not last long once the stage was over. “It was a good moment,” Almeida said. “I told him sorry afterwards. He said it was fine. I also do not think was big of a deal, but I think it was not, like, the correct way to say things. But it was nice. I think it actually put us a bit more together as well. It was maybe the start of a small relationship. So yeah, it was a good moment.”

Almeida is equally unromantic when he talks about how to beat, or at least challenge, a rider like Tadej Pogačar. He repeatedly framed the difference on the hardest days in very simple terms: either you are stronger or you are not. 

On medium mountain stages and on more chaotic days, he believes numbers and race craft still matter, but on the big climbs against the very best, pure strength will usually decide the outcome.

That matter of fact realism also shapes his view on his role inside UAE Team Emirates-XRG. Some riders insist on being the sole leader, even if that means moving to a weaker team. 

He has chosen another path and recently signed on long term “It is super nice,” he said about riding for Pogačar. “You feel part of something special. It is like a family. And personally, I like it. I think for me it is good to be part of it.”

He is clear about why he wants to stay exactly where he is. “I do not think I can beat Tadej at the moment,” Almeida admitted. “So I think I prefer maybe to do fourth or third and being part of his win, of history, than maybe try to do my result in other team and it is not really gonna change that much, right? That is the way I see things.”