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On stage 17 of the 2022 Giro d’Italia, João Almeida (UAE Team Emirates) did not know it, but when it came to GC aspirations in Italy’s Grand Tour that year, his number was already up.
For kilometre after kilometre on the lungburstingly-steep stack of hairpins and tunnels that comprises the Passo del Menador climb in the Dolomites, the plucky Portuguese racer had clung on grimly some 100 metres behind his top podium rivals – Richard Carapaz (Ineos Grenadiers), eventual winner Jai Hindley (Bora-Hansgrohe) and Mikel Landa (Bahrain Victorious) – before losing more ground on the high plateau that followed and which led to that day’s finish.
But if Almeida was just a minute behind his rivals at the finish and still talking post-stage of trying for the podium after his second hard day of limiting the gaps, his body knew otherwise.
At 3 a.m. in the early morning, Almeida woke with a bad fever. Multiple tests by the team diagnosed him with COVID-19. As a result, Almeida duly left the race as a DNS for stage 18. But curiously enough, one knock-on effect of that untimely departure was not necessarily a bad one, given it deepened the 24-year-old’s motivation to return to the Giro d’Italia in 2023 for what will be his fourth successive participation.
“I’ve got unfinished business with the Giro d’Italia,” Almeida told Cyclingnews during the off-season. “If I had done it normally, I’d maybe have gone to the Tour de France in 2023.
“But after the way it went, I want to do the Giro again, have a normal race with no setbacks and see what I can do.”
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but at the time, he says, he had no idea that COVID could be behind his under-the-weather feeling on stage 17, his first major setback of the race. As he puts it with refreshing candour, “it’s a Grand Tour so you have some shit days”.
“The last stage I rode I felt a bit weird, but some days in a Grand Tour, that just happens, we suffer more. Then at three or four in the morning, I woke up with a sore throat, temperature, in pain. Even it hadn’t been COVID, I couldn’t have started. But we did five or six tests and all of them came back positive anyway,” he said about nothing to be done.
“It was frustrating. I think I was up there, in a good position, and anything could happen in the last days, as we saw. But I’m young, so I can go back again. Situations like that, they’re part of the game.”
Almeida’s insistence on doing the racing equivalent of…
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