VALVERDE, FINALLY
The most intense emotions of World’s week emerged at the finish of the men’s elite race, where Alejandro Valverde dissolved into guttural sobs on winning the four-man sprint against Romain Bardet, Michael Woods and Tom Dumoulin. The race had been a good one, an exercise in slow-burning tension. Valverde’s first finish line had been the top of the Gramartboden and when he saw the company he kept at that point, he surely knew the sprint would be a formality. Valverde was at the front as the sprint started at 300m, but even from that imperfect position and distance, he won comfortably. He collapsed off his bike into the arms of Juan Carlos Escámez, his confidant and soigneur, who carried him aloft towards the podium. If Van der Breggen felt relief, what did Valverde, at 38, with six podiums among nine previous top 10s going back 15 years, feel? Deliverance? His tears suggested so. “I can retire happy now,” Valverde said, and the win quickly started to feel like his lifetime achievement award too.
Metres away, the French team pulled up. Bardet looked stunned. He took the felicitations of his fast-arriving compatriots in silence: three Frenchmen finished in the top 10. All week, the focus had been on Julian Alaphillipe, but seven ascents of the Olympia climb drew his sting. Bardet had stepped into the breach and taken second – his sixth one-day top-three of the season.
The dark horse was third-placed Michael Woods. In 2012, he was taking his first tentative steps in the sport. Six years later, he was now Canada’s first world road race medallist since Steve Bauer in 1984. Back in the team area Andreas Klier, Woods’s sports director at EF-Drapac but in charge of the German team, praised the 31-year-old. Not for going over the Höll first – his reputation as one of the best high-velocity, short-range climbers in the bunch precedes him – but for the descent and sprint. With one or two sketchy moments, he matched Bardet and Valverde all the way to the line. “At the beginning, when I first started working with him, I thought he doesn’t know how good he is,” said Klier. “Now I have the feeling he knows very well how good he is. That’s a thing that will help in the future.”
But the day belonged to el Bala, the Bullet. His winner’s press conference was packed with Spanish correspondents who had been dispatched for the final weekend. They had charted the squad’s altitude camp at the El Guerra hotel in the Sierra Nevada and the team’s missed flight to Austria, which cost it a day of acclimatisation. Now their reward was to write as many words as they liked about Valverde’s Odyssean quest. Also in the rows of conference chairs sat Valverde’s wife and two of their children. Óscar Freire, three times a world champion and Spain’s last rainbow jersey winner, was there too. “You deserve it,” he shouted up to Valverde at one point.
Outside, around the world, the bout of hand-wringing about Valverde’s past and his unrepentance over his part in Operación Puerto affair was beginning to find its voice. But for now, in a room full of friends, he was just “super contento”.