On the morning of the first Vuelta a España rest day, the scoring in the UAE Team Emirates-XRG vs Visma–Lease a Bike contest doesn’t look too bad. Three stage wins for the former against two for their great rivals.
UAE lead the mountains and team classifications, but Visma have had two days in the red jersey of the race leader. In the general classification, Jonas Vingegaard has won two stages, but only has a 38-second advantage over João Almeida after three of the race’s ten mountain-top finishes.
The two big days in Andorra didn’t present any opportunities so he stayed calm, followed Almeida and lulled UAE and everyone else into a false sense of security. Then, when everyone thought the climb to Valdezcaray on stage 9 would see a GC stalemate, he pounced and left UAE wondering what happened.
Almeida, as he is prone to, wasn’t paying enough attention and wasn’t where he needed to be – directly on the Dane’s back wheel. The result was he spent the whole climb chasing and though only Tom Pidcock (Q36.5) could stay with him, in his head he would have been lamenting that he was caught out.
Giulio Ciccone (Lidl-Trek) lasted a kilometre in Vingegaard’s slipstream before he had to let go, but if it had been Almeida who was in the right place, at the right time, the result could have been very different. He was strong enough to keep the gap reasonable when chasing, therefore, on such a fast climb he likely would have been fine on Vingegaard’s wheel. He probably wouldn’t have won the sprint to the line, though. The new dynamic Vingegaard is pretty fast.
Not all perfect at UAE Team Emirates
The one positive for Almeida is that at least the question of who is the team leader at UAE Team Emirates has been resolved fairly early in the race.
Juan Ayuso’s participation in that internal contest may have been an entirely media construct or just a line…
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