"Sickness In The Past Months Has Affected My Preparations Too Much" — Almeida Withdraws From The Giro d'Italia, Adam Yates Promoted To UAE's Outright Maglia Rosa Card
UAE Team Emirates-XRG have confirmed that João Almeida will not start the 2026 Giro d'Italia, with the Portuguese GC leader withdrawing on the eve of the Bulgarian Grande Partenza after a viral infection that first appeared after his Volta ao Algarve podium in February has refused to clear. Adam Yates has been promoted from designated mountain road captain to UAE's outright Maglia Rosa card for the three-week race, the most significant in-house leadership reshuffle the squad have made on the eve of a Grand Tour since the post-Pogačar injury reset of the 2024 spring.
"Sickness in the past months has affected my preparations too much and has meant I just won't quite be ready in time," Almeida said in a statement released through the team's Abu Dhabi service course on Wednesday afternoon. "Together with the team we have decided to take a rest period and switch focus to new goals later in the season." The 27-year-old, who finished on the third step of the 2025 Giro podium and held the bookmaker-favourite line through the post-Romandie window, withdrew from Paris-Nice in mid-March with what the team initially described as a "minor viral episode," and team doctor Adrian Rotunno confirmed Wednesday that follow-up bloodwork through April and into early May had not produced the clean recovery curve UAE's medical staff had targeted by the end of the Tour of the Alps.
The withdrawal hands the outright pre-race favourite line to Jonas Vingegaard on the strongest GC reading the Dane has carried at the eight-weeks-out checkpoint of any Grand Tour since the 2023 reference. Visma-Lease a Bike have already locked in a Vingegaard-Kuss-Kelderman protected-GC brief built explicitly around what manager Richard Plugge described last week as "the cleanest pre-Giro form curve we have ever seen on a Vingegaard programme," and the Dane arrives in Bulgaria off back-to-back overall victories at Paris-Nice and the Volta a Catalunya — a closing-spring two-stage-race sweep that has not been recorded by a Grand Tour favourite since Bradley Wiggins' 2012 reference. The Almeida withdrawal collapses the principal challenge the bookmakers had priced into the Vingegaard line and has UAE conceding, in the words of one Abu Dhabi briefing, "we have a different race now."
Adam Yates inherits a team that has been redrawn around him. The 33-year-old Briton heads into his third Giro start (ninth in 2017, twelfth in 2025) on the back of a closing-Spanish-camp altitude block at Sierra Nevada and a clean overall victory at O Gran Camiño in late February. "Not having João will change our strategy slightly, but we still have big ambitions and still want to go for results," Yates said from the team's Sunny Beach hotel. "Personally, I feel like the shape is good and if things go our way we can have a good crack at the GC and animate the race." His first Grand Tour podium would put him on the same closing list as twin brother Simon Yates, the 2018 Vuelta and 2024 Giro winner, on a script that has now followed the Yates family for almost a decade.
Around Yates the squad reads Jhonatan Narváez, Marc Soler, Jay Vine, Mikkel Bjerg, Igor Arrieta, Tim Wellens and Italian neo-pro Federico Pellegrino. Narváez carries the closing-week breakaway-and-stage-hunting brief he turned into a maglia rosa-on-Stage-1 reference at the 2024 Grande Partenza, Soler rides his sixth consecutive Giro on a free climbing-domestique role, Vine returns from the cervical fracture that ended his 2025 spring, and Bjerg gives the team a chrono engine for the Stage 10 Massa individual time trial. The squad as a whole is the most attacking-flexible roster UAE have tabled for a Grand Tour since the post-2022 reset and gives Yates a tactical menu that runs from breakaway-stage opportunism through to a deeply protected closing-mountain block on the Stage 16 Tonale and Stage 19 Bormio queen stages.
The principal challenge to Vingegaard now lands on Giulio Pellizzari (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe), the 22-year-old Italian who solo'd the closing stage of the Tour of the Alps to take overall victory ahead of Egan Bernal and Thymen Arensman in late April. Red Bull arrive in Bulgaria with the cleanest pre-Giro form curve they have ever locked into a Pellizzari programme, the Italian's closing-week 5.9 W/kg sustained six-minute summit pull at Latsch reading a touch above the comparable Tour of the Alps numbers from Tao Geoghegan Hart ahead of his 2020 Giro overall — the principal data-point comparison the bookmakers used to compress Pellizzari from a pre-Tour-of-the-Alps 14/1 outright down to a Wednesday-afternoon 5/1 second-card line behind Vingegaard.
The withdrawal also closes a longer chapter. Almeida had been on a twin Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a España programme that UAE built in February as the Portuguese rider's most ambitious season since his maiden 2020 Maglia Rosa attempt, with a Champs-Élysées sit-out giving him the calendar window to chase a maiden Grand Tour podium-or-better double in the same calendar year. With the Giro now off the programme, Almeida and the team will reconvene at the Pas de la Casa altitude house in mid-May to map out a closing-summer reset, with the Vuelta a España still understood to be the principal target for what would now be a single-Grand-Tour 2026 season for the Portuguese leader.
For UAE, the Almeida withdrawal is the second pre-Grand-Tour leadership reset of a 2026 season already shaped by injury and illness. Isaac del Toro's grade-two rectus femoris tear at the Itzulia ruled the Mexican out of the entire Ardennes block, and Marc Hirschi's departure to Tudor Pro Cycling in the winter formally closed UAE's classics-and-Grand-Tour-bridging brief. The squad's Tour de France leadership remains untouched — Tadej Pogačar and Del Toro start as twin protected GC cards from the 4 July Lille Grande Départ — but with Almeida now off the Giro programme, the Pogačar 4/9 outright line that has held through nineteen consecutive checkpoints stops being just a closing-summer headline and starts being the only line the squad have that matters.