Alejandro Valverde shrugged off the pressure of his status as outstanding pre-race favourite to claim his third triumph in a decade at Liège-Bastogne-Liège on Sunday. And just like last Wednesday’s win at Flèche Wallone, the Spanish veteran made no errors whatsoever en route to the sixth Ardennes Classics victory of his career.
Throughout the 253-kilometre race, Valverde and Movistar played a very calculating game, knowing that with one Ardennes victory already in the bag, the pressure was on his rivals. First Europcar, then Astana and finally Katusha and Etixx-QuickStep laid down much of the pace on the front, with Zdenek Stybar (Etixx-QuickStep) doing the spadework to reel in a dangerous late break with Giampaolo Caruso (Katusha), Roman Kreuziger (Tinkoff-Saxo) and Jakob Fuglsang (Astana) as the race hit the foot of the Côte de Saint-Nicolas.
Equally, Valverde himself refused to let himself be drawn into any of the battles on the Roche-aux-Faucons or the Saint-Nicolas. Instead, the Spanish veteran conserved as much energy as possible and shadowed the most dangerous moves. Even when Valverde was handed, as top favourite, the responsibility of heading the bunch on the final climb to Ans, his pace was nowhere near as sustained as on when he shut down the attacks on the first three-quarters of the Mur de Huy on Wednesday.
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That tactic had certain inherent risks, as Dani Moreno (Katusha) showed when he burst clear in the last kilometre. But as the 35-year-old Valverde said later, keeping a cool head and calculating his distance – 600 metres – “allowed me to get back up to Dani again. And I always kept a little bit of strength back [a ‘little bullet’, as Valverde called it in Spanish] so I could go for it in the sprint afterwards.
“That was a really hard moment, I suffered a lot to get back to Moreno. But I knew I had to get him. Everybody had placed the responsibility for controlling the race on my shoulders, but I knew what I was going to have to do to win.
“I started as the big favourite, I knew all the other guys were watching me, but I knew that I could do something just the same. Second in Amstel, first in Flèche, first in Liege, it’s been an amazing week.”
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