Four days after he racked up the latest of a succession of near misses in the Amstel Gold Race, Alejandro Valverde (Movistar) showed once again that at Flèche Wallonne, not even major changes to the race route can stop the Spanish all-rounder from winning.
The much-discussed addition of the Côte de Cherave climb in the final part of the 200 kilometre Classic certainly thinned out the pack, but when the efforts really began to take a toll on the Mur de Huy, Valverde’s blue-clad figure was there at the front again, poised to pounce.
The Spaniard’s third victory, taken with a finely-calculated show of strength on the final kilometre of the Mur, has now placed Valverde on a level pegging with Moreno Argentin, Eddy Merckx, Marcel Kint and Davide Rebellin as the fifth rider to score a hat-trick of Flèche Wallonne wins. His is also the fourth Spanish victory in succession on the Mur de Huy, after Joaquim Rodriguez in 2012, Dani Moreno a year later and Valverde himself in 2014.
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Second in Amstel Gold and now first in Flèche Wallonne, Valverde agreed that compared to 2014, his strategy had been different on the Mur de Huy, where last April he darted away from the pack with 200 metres to go. The Côte de Cherave, he argued, had made for a much calmer finale, with few attacks. His tactics this time were no less effective though, keeping the opposition under tight control with a sustained pace for most of the climb until, as he put it, “we reached the right distance,” to accelerate away for victory.
“The second last climb conditioned the race, and stopped people from being so keen to attack on the last ascent,” Valverde told reporters after politely wishing everybody ‘buenas tardes’ [Good Afternoon] as he started his press conference. “I simply laid down a steady pace at the front that would try to rein my rivals in if they attacked on the Mur and the thing was that none of them did.
“Then I went for it when we reached the right distance for me [roughly 150 metres from the line.] I knew at that point I was going to win, because I still had the spark left to turn in another acceleration.”
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