Despite an impressive ride at Dwars door Vlaanderen, Alejandro Valverde has decided to skip the Tour of Flanders.
Valverde said that he was tempted to stay on in Belgium to race the Tour of Flanders, but he has decided to stick to his original plan of travelling to Spain for the GP Miguel Indurain.
“We have been evaluating it, and in the end, I won’t race the Tour of Flanders,” he said. “We will go to Spain and on Saturday I will be in the Grand Prix Miguel Indurain. Flanders is a really important, beautiful race, but we decided to return home and it wasn’t to be.
“I would like to race, but I have taken a lot from my body with continuous, really hard, racing. Indurain is a hard race, but not like Sunday.”
“I am tired and still cold,” he said a long while after the race had reached its conclusion. “They were 180 kilometres where it was raining all the time and two or three degrees, and we had a really hard race due to the weather. The weather was worse than the cobbles.”
“You couldn’t eat as well, and you couldn’t grab the food with frosted hands,” he continued. “There was a lot of attention. It was a very complicated race. The cobbles are hard but today it was more the weather.”
Valverde appeared in Dwars door Vlaanderen along with Nairo Quintana to prepare for the cobbled stage that will feature in the 2018 Tour de France.
