Stage seven of the Tour de France was a day mixed with elation and anguish for UAE Team Emirates-XRG. Tadej Pogačar took the stage to Mûr-de-Bretagne and in doing so reclaimed the yellow jersey, but João Almeida broke a rib in a high-speed crash in the finale. Two days later, on stage nine, he was forced to abandon the race.
Despite UAE’s obvious main goal being Pogačar’s fourth Tour crown, Almeida was never merely a support act. He arrived at the Tour as the world champion’s key mountain lieutenant, the kind who could whittle the bunch down, setting Pogačar up for a trademark attack. But he was also a key podium contender himself, right up there with the triumvirate of Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) and Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-Quickstep). His 2025 season had been exemplary and his best yet: victories in Romandie, the Basque Country, and the Tour de Suisse showed he was ready not just to support Pogačar but also to fight for a general classification result.
So how does his loss affect the race and UAE’s tactics going forward? Put simply, Pogačar is still the heavy favourite to be wearing the maillot jaune on the Champs-Elysées in two Sunday’s time and Almeida’s loss doesn’t change this. But the Portuguese rider’s abandon is likely to change the way the race unfolds between now and then. As the third or fourth best climber in the race, Almeida’s role would have been to get the front of the select group and sap the legs of Pogačar’s rivals, control the tempo, and absorb chaos and attacks, and launch his team leader by setting a pace on the front. His loss unravels that control for UAE.
João Almeida crashed hard on stage seven (Image: Zac Williams / SWpix.com)
The team now are forced into some form of improvisation. The original hierarchy placed Almeida as the last domestique in the line, with Adam Yates being the second last rider. With Almeida out, Yates must shoulder the high mountain support alone, unless Pavel Sivakov can survive far enough up the ascents to do some of the control and launch work. It may not change much because Pogačar still seems to be the best rider on the climbs — as shown in his performances at the Dauphiné — but he will be without a key rider as a launchpad. UAE’s tactical blueprint must shift, likely pushing the turns of riders like Yates, Siavkov and Jhonatan Narváez further forward and asking more from every available rider. The upcoming mountain stages may become more open than we previously thought. UAE won’t want to burn through these riders and risk exposing any weakness that Pogačar may have (if any).
A loss like this isn’t just tactical in terms of how UAE approach the race, but also how other squads capitalise off it. The peloton, ever attentive to weakness, will already be recalculating. Vingegaard and Visma know what this means; they now look like the best team in the high mountains with Matteo Jorgenson, Simon Yates and Sepp Kuss, on paper, stronger than the remaining UAE contingent. Without Almeida’s presence on the front, Pogačar becomes more exposed in the mid-mountain phases — the long drags and the brutal final kicks where the elite of the elite test each. The yellow jersey may sit on Pogačar’s back, but the team’s grip on it has loosened, if only a little bit.
At the end of the day, the strongest rider wins the Tour — the mountain stages to come, like the key climbs of the Hautacam, Ventoux and Col de la Loze are too challenging for it to be any other way, but cycling has always been a team sport and the support is vitally important even for the greatest cyclists ever, like Pogačar. However, the Slovenian himself has thrived before in moments where pressure threatened to smother him. It is his capacity not only to suffer, but to do so under challenging race situations, that makes him the rider he is — even when his support crumbles.
