Bora: Joao Almannda - The Portugese brother.
Disappointing performance from him yesterday, and it is also a problem for Deceuninck in general. Having two great contenders was pretty much the only advantage they had, but now they face a lot of competion from teams who seem at least as decent as they are.
Just a bad day... From an interview made and published today he said that he usually underperforms in that kind of weather conditions and that he made a mistake by not feeding properly during the stage, so he cracked in the last 3 kms...it was very unexpected to see him losing more than 4 minutes to the others GC contenders in a stage that had the right profile for Almeida to do well... he lost in 3 kms as much time as he lost at last years Stelvio Stage.
Since then however he's showing good form, he's rolling quite easy as we saw at the final climb at stage 9, keeping up with Bardet, Caruso, Soler, Martinez, Buchmann, Formolo, Carthy, Yates... and it seemed to me that he lost a couple of seconds just by being worried about Remco´s position, he was seen looking behind several times trying to find where the hell was Remco.
He has no pressure atm, just to work for Remco and if Remco goes well he will move up some places at the GC. Perhaps with a little bit of luck he can get a Top10 GC with the last ITT.
He still has a lot to improve at the high mountains but the way he paces himself at those high mountains stages with only 22 years old impress me.