João Almeida crashed out of the Tour de Pologne. The Vuelta starts in two weeks
A pile-up in the rain took down around thirty riders 42km from the stage four finish and forced organisers to neutralise the race. His team found no fractures, but the Portuguese rider did not start on Friday.
João Almeida did not roll out for stage five of the Tour de Pologne. The day before he had gone down in a mass crash in the wet, and a season that was already awkward now has another question mark on it.
The pile-up came 42 kilometres from the finish in Karpacz and involved around thirty riders, race leader Jonathan Milan among them. Organisers neutralised the stage and, after talking to the peloton, changed the closing kilometres. Almeida finished the day but lost close to sixteen minutes. His UAE team-mate Juan Sebastián Molano abandoned on the spot.
What is known about the injuries
The team reported no fractures. He was left with abrasions to a knee and an ankle, the kind of damage that keeps nobody off a bike for months but writes off a week of training, and it happens to be the week he needed.
Why this matters more than one stage
Poland was his first race in seven weeks. Almeida had only just returned to competition after abandoning the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes in mid-June, and the Polish race was the last block of preparation before the Vuelta a España, which runs from 22 August to 13 September.
So the rider UAE intends to send to Spain as a leader now arrives with a fortnight of racing in his legs and a crash in the middle of it. That is not fatal — he has built strong grand tours off strange build-ups before, and he won this same Tour de Pologne back in 2021 — but it is the opposite of the plan drawn up in January.
Nothing has been announced about the final squad for Spain. Teams usually confirm those a few days before the start, and that is when it will be clear whether this cost him a week or rather more.
By Vasco Almada
Image: Cs-wolves / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
