João Almeida: "Almost surreal" to have made history in cycling

João Almeida admits that it is “almost surreal” to have become the first cyclist to win the Tours of Switzerland, Romandie and Basque Country in the same season, an achievement based on hard work, but also on the fact that he never gives up.

“ It’s almost surreal . In cycling, nowadays, it’s very difficult to win races, the level is very high. Every victory has a great taste. For many years now, my focus has been on stage races, and things don’t always go well. If someone had told me that I would win three this season, I would have said “it’s beyond lying” or “lying is ugly”, as they say”, he confessed, in statements to the Lusa news agency.

On Sunday, the Portuguese from UAE Emirates won the Tour of Switzerland, after staging a memorable comeback , winning his third consecutive WorldTour stage race — he won Itzulia in mid-April and Romandia in early May, after having already finished second in the Tour of the Valencian Community and the Algarve and sixth in Paris-Nice.

“I have five overall victories in my career and I won three of them in the WorldTour this season in a row. It was the result of a lot of work, obviously, but things have gone quite well,” summed up the winner of the Tours of Poland and Luxembourg, both in 2021.

At 26 years old, Almeida continues to leave his mark on the history of Portuguese cycling, but also on the world stage, as he became the first rider since Briton Bradley Wiggins in 2012 to win three of the seven main one-week races in the same season — the others being Paris-Nice, Tirreno-Adriatico, Volta a Catalunya and Criterio du Dauphiné.

“Obviously, we have to be realistic: I think that the fact that there is an absence of a Tadej Pogacar, of a Jonas Vingegaard, makes things less difficult, but clearly it is still quite difficult,” he conceded.

And, in this Tour de Suisse, the cyclist from A-dos-Francos (Caldas da Rainha) had a particularly complicated mission: at the end of the first stage, he had a disadvantage of more than three minutes to the leader , the Frenchman Romain Grégoire (Groupama-FDJ), after the peloton took a while to organize itself in pursuit of a breakaway of important men.

“I knew it was going to be quite difficult, because it was a very big advantage — three minutes. On the other hand, I knew that not all was lost, because there were a lot of riders who had stayed in my group, in the peloton, like Félix Gall, etc., so I wasn’t alone. It’s different,” he said.

The number one favourite heading into the Swiss race, the Portuguese rider was aware that the cyclists ahead of him in the overall standings, “despite being quite strong”, were within his reach.

“I knew I was superior, that I could gain time, I just didn’t know when. From then on, we started racing hard and seizing every opportunity we had to gain time, and it worked out well,” he congratulated himself.

Almeida and UAE Emirates drew up “a good plan”, which involved “ giving everything” in “every stage where it was possible to gain time, even if it was just a little”.

And the plan could not have gone better: he won the fourth and seventh stages, before finally dethroning, in the time trial on the last day, also with a victory, the Frenchman Kévin Vauquelin (Arkéa B&B Hotels), another of the escapees from the opening day, who became the leader on the fifth day.

“That adversity in the first stage forced me to be more aggressive, because either I was more aggressive and tried to go for everything that moved, or I had to give up. […] We gave everything we had to give and we managed to achieve the objective”, he summed up to Lusa.

(Re)known for his “impossible” recoveries, dubbed by fans of the sport as “almeidadas”, the man who is currently one of the best international cyclists in the peloton laughed when the term came up in conversation.

“This was a next-level Almeidada, I would say,” joked the fourth-placed rider on the Tour2024, who has nine victories this season alone, all of them on the WorldTour, in a list of 22 triumphs.