This page contains the stage podium, the race story, GC implications after the stage, and per-rider performance. Read no further if you intend to watch this stage unspoiled.
Remco Evenepoel won the queen stage to Teulada Moraira and seized the overall lead, with João Almeida and Giulio Pellizzari completing the stage podium that would become the final GC top three.
The 172 km queen stage from La Nucía to Teulada Moraira was the day the general classification was settled. After a hard day's climbing through the hinterland of the Costa Blanca, the GC group came down to its strongest names. Remco Evenepoel, already the strongest against the clock, proved the best on the decisive terrain too, winning the stage and lifting the leader's jersey from Biniam Girmay. João Almeida was the only rider able to limit his losses to within striking distance, finishing second at 24 seconds, with Giulio Pellizzari, Antonio Tiberi and Brandon McNulty completing the top five in the same group behind Almeida. The result locked in the GC hierarchy for the final day.
Evenepoel moved into the overall lead with his queen-stage win, displacing Girmay. Behind him the GC tightened around the Red Bull and UAE camps: Almeida sat second, Pellizzari third, Tiberi fourth and McNulty fifth — the exact order in which they would finish the race in Valencia. With a flat-ish final day to come, the overall was all but decided.
This was the day Evenepoel converted his time-trial advantage into the overall. He was the strongest climber in the decisive group and finished it off with the stage win at Teulada Moraira, taking the leader's jersey from Girmay. The 24-second buffer he opened on Almeida here was essentially the winning margin of the race, since the final stage offered no GC-relevant terrain.
Almeida was the only GC rider able to follow Evenepoel's pace on the queen stage and limit his losses to 24 seconds, the rest of the contenders trailing in behind him. It confirmed Almeida as the clear second-best stage racer in the field and set up his runner-up finish overall — a solid but not decisive early-season GC showing as UAE's leader for the week.
Pellizzari finished third on the stage in the chase group behind Almeida, doubling as Evenepoel's most important mountain support and his own GC ride. The young Italian's climbing form delivered both a podium finish overall and the youth classification, an encouraging early-season marker for one of Red Bull's brightest GC prospects.