More than four months have passed since Alejandro Valverde was last seen in race action, when the Movistar rider ploughed at high speed into a crash barrier on the opening time trial of the Tour de France, smashing one of his knee caps and breaking a talus bone in his ankle.
There were widespread fears that evening that Valverde’s career was finished, but in his first major press conference since the accident, the 37-year-old said that he is raring to go again and will once more target the Ardennes Classics in the first part of the season. The only permanent legacy of that crash, Valverde hopes, will be the four screws in his leg used to pin his injuries, given he does not plan to have them removed. But his goals in the first part of the 2018 season are already set, and they are no less ambitious than before.
“It’s very difficult, but I would like to win a fifth Liege-Bastogne-Liege next season, more than winning Amstel Gold for the first time,” Valverde told reporters at the Movistar team meeting near Pamplona. “A fifth Liege would make the same number of wins as Eddy. [Merckx.]”
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Valverde’s run of Ardennes wins now means he is already the all-time record holder for Fleche Wallonne, with five – “and if I can get a sixth, even better,” he added with a grin – and he currently stands only one short of Merckx’s all-time record in Liege-Bastogne-Liege. At an age when many riders have long opted for retirement, Valverde’s decision to come back from such major injuries and continue racing puts him in a class of his own in other ways, too.
“We all know what has happened to me and I don’t feel tired, or weary, neither in my head nor in my body. I don’t feel like I’m 37, I feel ten years younger,” Valverde insisted.
“I’ve done about 6,000 kilometres in training. My idea was, once I started training, to reach as good a form as I possibly could and that’s what I’ve done. I feel as if I started racing, I would be close to fighting for a win.
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