EYEWITNESS: VALVERDE’S HOMECOMING
Alejandro Valverde has been racing the Vuelta a Murcia, his home event, since 2002. This year, for the first time he took part wearing the rainbow jersey. Procycling followed the world champion on his local roads
Procycling was at the Vuelta a la Murcia to watch world champion Alejandro Valverde’s fanfare return t0 his home race
Saturday 16 February, 9am, and it’s the morning of stage 2 of the Vuelta a Murcia. In the tiny village of Las Lumbreras, where Alejandro Valverde grew up, it's so quiet and empty you could hear a pin drop, despite all the excitement and media hype across the region concerning the world champion’s presence in his home race.
Through the early morning haze, a 14-metre high statue of Christ with outstretched arms - the original blown up during the Spanish Civil War, only to be rebuilt during the Franco dictatorship in an even more imposing version - gazes down impassively from the top of a nearby hillside. Beneath it, most of Las Lumbreras consists of an unappealing, equally silent mixture of batteredlooking bungalows, grimy narrow backstreets and the occasional garden with fine sets of oranges and lemon trees, where only the occasional cat stirs.
It’s only when you go into the village’s one shop, officially a tobacconist but also furnished with a tiny wooden bar running down one side and a photocopier for its customers in another corner, that you find any activity. In a room so small it would fit inside the Movistar team bus, there’s a group of local pensioners noisily knocking back an early glass of wine and shooting the breeze while behind the bar, the equally aged owners pour drinks and their granddaughter sits scratching her head over her maths homework.
Above them all, just along from the typical small portrait of Christ, you find as a spiritual protector in so many Spanish small businesses, there is another, more worldly, icon: a signed photo of El Bala Valverde, arms flung out as he crosses the line in his first really major triumph outside Spain, an Alpine stage in the 2005 Tour de France. Just behind, Lance Armstrong, defeated by the young Bala, gazes balefully down at his handlebars. After that stage, Armstrong described Valverde as “maybe the future of cycling”, but 14 years on, it’s stories of the Valverde family past and present everybody in the bar is more interested in recounting.
They dredge up from their memories tales of Alejandro as a child and teenager, heading out past their front doors every day on his training rides, already determined to become a pro. They mull over the varying fortunes of the three Valverde brothers. And they point out, not, without a certain degree of local pride, that Valverde’s eldest relatives still live in Las Lumbreras, and Valverde himself just a few kilometres away.
Indeed another poster on the tobacconist’s wall is an advert for a type of wine called Dos Ruedas [Two Wheels], with a signed dedication from “Alejandro, friend and neighbour”. So no prizes for guessing that when the neighbours and friends’ wine glasses are raised together for a deep-throated early morning toast, they shout, “¡Viva Valverde!”
One of the reasons Valverde is so appreciated in Las Lumbreras, and indeed, across Murcia, is that people say he has stayed close to his roots. They’ve seen him stick with Murcia through the good times and the bad.
The good times have been many: Valverde has been winning top-level races since 2003. But there have also been bad, such as the ban Valverde served for
his links to Operación Puerto, Spanish cycling’s biggest ever anti-doping investigation. “I remember during the time of his suspension on the morning of one New Year’s Day, I was out with my family and Valverde came riding past, training,” says Murcia director Paco Guzman, sitting in the bar of the sports hall that serves as the race headquarters.
“New Year is a day when you wouldn’t expect to see a soul out and about. But that’s how dedicated Alejandro is to his sport.”
Guzman is appreciative, too, of Valverde’s loyalty to his home race in Murcia, for which he holds the record of participations: 12 since 2002. “As world champion, he could have headed to much bigger races elsewhere. The Colombia Tour even announced he was taking part,” he says. “But Alejandro was born in 1980, the year before the Vuelta a Murcia started. He grew up seeing the race and the stars that were part of it. And we knew he’d be coming again this year, wearing his rainbow jersey. And there will be people at the starts and the finishes, along the roadsides, seeing him go past. I really want them to be imbued in the feel of the sport.”
Valverde began this year’s race as the favourite to win. Before 2019, Valverde already held a record five wins in Murcia, along with two second places and a third. And despite the start of the race’s opening stage this year being held in the far-flung town of Yecla, close to Murcia’s edge, where many locals speak Valencian, the next region’s language, it’s easy to see how popular Valverde remains. A quick head count of fans outside 17 of the 18 team buses and campervans in the nondescript parking lot outside Yecla bus station that serves as the start never reaches anywhere close to double figures. But at Movistar, around 200 members of the public crowd round the edge of the barrier tape, among them Valverde’s mother and brother Juan Francisco. Three burly members of the local police force have been roped in to guide Valverde when he finally emerges for the 50-metre journey to the signing on podium. And every step of the way to the start line, he’s inundated with smiles, demands for autographs, selfies, slaps on the back, deafening shouts and applause.
“One New Year’s Day, I was out with my family and he rode past, training. New Year is a day when you wouldn’t expect to see a soul. But that’s how dedicated Alejandro is to his sport” Paco Guzman, race director
Valverde’s former Movistar teammate Alex Dowsett explains the world champion’s popularity. “There’s no ego there,” says Dowsett as he stands outside the Katusha team bus, where team-mate Dani Navarro’s partner, a friend and their small pet dog are the only well-wishers.
“He would chat to me when I joined the team as a youngster as he would to the most experienced guys in the sport. And Valverde would commit as hard to helping someone else as he would to racing for himself. He’d always say thank you if you worked for him. I feel like everyone in his eyes is equal, and I’d imagine that’s how he goes about his day-to-day life as well.
“Everyone loves the local hero and you could liken it to Froome perhaps in the UK not being as well followed as Geraint is in Wales. When somebody is from your area, there’s a specific interest. And it’s an aspirational thing - it’s like someone down the road has made it big, so why can’t I do it, or my kids do the same?”
In some quarters, mainly outside Spain, there are mixed feelings about Valverde’s Worlds win and as Dowsett says, “You can’t ignore that. But to be on the podium of the Worlds and try as hard as he has, to see a guy fight that hard and put his balls on the line every time he races… it seems like every day’s a Valverde day.”
Valverde may have reached the top of the cycling world, but the Vuelta a Murcia remains very much a local affair with international interest. It started life as an amateur race in 1981, its inaugural edition being won by one Pedro Delgado, and it developed into a professional event by the end of the 1980s. It is still only ranked at 2.1, and sometimes budgetary restrictions have reduced it to a one-day event, but over the years, top riders and promising young racers have tackled the tree-lined slopes of the Alto de Collado Bermejo, Murcia’s highest climb, then wound their way past the innumerable vegetable fields and greenhouses across the region or powered along the flat, broad avenues in downtown Murcia. The strong fields are partly explained because of Murcia’s place among a string of early-season Spanish events starting with Mallorca, continuing in Murcia’s northerly neighbour Valencia and so on into races further to the south like the GP Almería and Ruta del Sol in Andalucia.
Pedro Delgado is not the only illustrious winner of Murcia. Miguel Indurain took his first ever stage race victory in Spain here while Chris Boardman’s double win in the 1994 prologue and final time trial had British
cycling journalists calling Spanishbased colleagues to find out where on earth Murcia actually was. Both Marco Pantani and Armstrong were regular visitors in the late 1990s, with the first rider over the Collado Bermejo still receiving the Trofeo Marco Pantani award, and the Italian winning here in 1999. Indeed, Armstrong and Pantani’s infamous falling out on the Mont Ventoux in the 2000 Tour de France was patched up over steaks in a restaurant in the capital of Murcia the following February. Murcia also saw Nairo Quintana claim victory in 2012 in his first stage race win as a WorldTour pro. “That he was able to win the first summit finish at Murcia was surprising enough,” Movistar director Jose Luis Arrieta recounted. “But he’d already won a mountain stage in the Tour de l’Avenir. What really caught our attention was how he then held his own in the Murcia time trial the next day.”
In the bleak winds of Spain’s economic crisis of the last decade, though, Murcia all but disappeared, shrinking from six days at its peak to just one by 2013.
It was in no small part thanks to the efforts of the Guzman family - Paco’s father Alfonso started the race, his sister Carmen ran it for several years and Paco’s son Fran is the current production director - that Murcia did not end up being suspended completely.
Battered, then, but still surviving, the Vuelta a Murcia has remained much like the region in which it takes place - smallish and unpretentious, but much more attractive than you might initially think. Given Murcia recently ranked as having become one of Spain’s four poorest regions in the last 20 years, its home race offers a golden opportunity for local pride to shine through. And with a home world champion in the ranks, even more so.
As the race wends its way through the backstreets of villages as small as or smaller than Las Lumbreras, its imminent arrival is announced by a couple of loudspeakers balanced so precariously on the back of a pickup truck they look as if they might fall off at any moment. There seems to be a larger-than-usual number of noncyclists on the roadsides. A fair sprinkling of team jerseys and a few toddlers in rainbow jerseys maybe, but most of the public look to have just nipped out of their houses to watch.
And there are lots of them. “This is the second time I’ve been in the Vuelta a Murcia. I’ve seen more fans on the sides of the roads here in Spain - in Valencia, Mallorca and now Murcia than ever before,” says Antonio Soto, a locally-born rider with the Euskadi-Murias team who headed north to the Basque Country because of the dearth of U23 teams in Murcia. “You can tell who they’ve come out to see and cheer.”
Valverde, the object and focus of all this attention, is clearly determined not just to soak up the applause. When Pello Bilbao, heading a very strong Astana team, outwits the sprinters with a late attack on the opening day, it’s Valverde who heads the small chase group on the exposed finishing straight at the end of
“I’ve seen more fans on the sides of the roads - in Valencia, Mallorca and now Murcia, than ever. You can tell who they’ve come to see” Antonio Soto, Euskadi- Murias
the stage in the windswept coastal town of San Javier. (It shows how irritated Valverde was not to have caught Bilbao, perhaps, that this is the one finish where he fails to come off the Movistar team bus afterwards, despite the fans waiting for a good half hour for him.)
Then, the next day, on the crucial ascent of La Cresta del Gallo, Valverde lopes out of the leading group just before the first of a string of viciously curving hairpin bends, rising to 14 per cent in places, the local boy knowing exactly where his attack would hurt the most.
However, the rider who holds El Bala’s wheel the longest, Astana’s Luis León Sánchez, is as Murcia born and bred as Valverde. Valverde could shed Sánchez before he took the sharp right-hand bend that led over the summit of the Cresta del Gallo, but Sánchez was able to regain contact with Valverde on the flatter run-in to the finish in Murcia. With Astana riders leading the chase behind, Sánchez could justify sitting in, and keeping the strength to jump away from Valverde with 200 metres to go.
If there is any regret at losing the chance to win his first race in the world champion’s jersey it is quickly forgotten. Valverde sits up and applauds as he freewheels across the line behind the winner, then afterwards they give each other a big hug. This is a concession: Sánchez will win the overall classification as well as the stage.
Standing roadside to watch him on the Cresta del Gallo was Graham Baxter, a British amateur racer who moved to Murcia nearly 20 years ago and ran cycling holidays. Baxter first met Valverde out training, when he punctured: “He didn’t know who I was, but he stopped and gave me a spare tube.”
He’s part of the training group of 20 or 30 riders who go out with El Bala whenever he trains locally. “Anybody can go, so long as they can ride a bike,” says Soto, who lives nearby.
Baxter confirms that Valverde’s Worlds win was very popular locally: “We go out training on the service road to the sierras and there are cars and lorries on the motorway, hooting away as they go past. It’s not like it’s gone crazy, but everybody knows about it.”
Valverde sits up and applauds as he freewheels across the line behind the winner, then afterwards they give each other a big hug. This is a concession: Sánchez will win the GC as well as the stage
But the rainbow jersey will last a year and Valverde’s career is surely approaching its end. “Not having it before was probably what was keeping him going,” Baxter says.
This then, raises the question of what Valverde’s real legacy will be for cycling in his region. The answer is, perhaps, is in the kids and juniors kitted out in Valverde Team-Terra Fecundis jerseys at the start of the second stage, milling around and waiting for Valverde to appear. The Foundation is now in its sixth year, expanding to 90 members in 2019 and has now created a U23 team, starting this season. This is no vanity project, either. “Right now in Murcia, work is badly needed at the base level,” says Juan Francisco, Valverde’s eldest brother. “There are just three or four amateur teams, a few associations that work in schools. But that’s it. In the junior levels, too, the number of races didn’t disappear during the recession, but higher up the situation has been really bad. That’s why we’re trying to organise races, too.”
In terms of the Vuelta a Murcia, after becoming a twoday stage race again in 2019, its organisers are determined to tack on a third day in 2020, and Paco Guzman has no doubt that among local businesses and town halls the knock-on effect of having a homegrown World Champion will do that objective no harm whatsoever. You’d imagine the Valverde training rides will continue to provide another hub for local riders as well, whether or not the man at the centre of it all is wearing a rainbow jersey in 2020, too; also that after his retirement, he’ll still be out sprinting for signs with his riding buddies. Long-term he doesn’t seem to be going anywhere that isn’t Murcia: and at this point in his life and career you can’t help thinking, why should he?