page_title: Alejandro Valverde
section_title: 2017
hierarchical_section_title: Alejandro Valverde / Biography / Caisse d'Epargne/Movistar (2005–present) / 2017
caption_attribution_description: Tour de France 2017 Stage 1 Duesseldolf
context_page_description: Alejandro Valverde Belmonte is a Spanish road racing cyclist, who currently rides for UCI WorldTeam Movistar Team. Valverde's biggest wins have been the Vuelta a España in 2009, Critérium du Dauphiné in 2008 and 2009, Tour of the Basque Country in 2017, Volta a Catalunya in 2009, 2017 and 2018, Liège–Bastogne–Liège in 2006, 2008, 2015 and 2017, La Flèche Wallonne in 2006, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017, the Clásica de San Sebastián in 2008 and 2014, the 2006 and 2008 UCI ProTours, the 2014 and 2015 UCI World Tours, and the road race in the 2018 World Championships.
  Overall, Valverde has 127 professional wins. Prior to his Worlds win, he already held the record for most medals won at World Championships – he twice collected the silver medal in the World Championships, in 2003 and 2005, as well as the bronze four times in 2006, 2012, 2013 and 2014. As of 2019, Valverde has placed in the Top 10 of a Grand Tour nineteen times. Valverde is rare in combining different specialities in road bicycle racing, being a strong climbing specialist, sprinter and a good time-trialist. The online database Cycling Ranking ranks him as the 4th best cyclist of all time.
context_section_description: In February 2017 Valverde took his first win of the season at the Vuelta a Murcia, a race that he had previously won four times. He followed this up with a win in the Vuelta a Andalucía for the fifth time in six years, defeating runner-up Alberto Contador by a single second and winning stage one in the process. The overall win was the 100th victory in Valverde's career. After not starting Paris–Nice due to illness, Valverde went on to dominate the Volta a Catalunya by winning stages three, five, and seven and beating runner-up Contador by over a minute. This was done in spite of him and his team being given a one-minute penalty for "pushes" in the opening team time trial. At the Tour of the Basque Country, Valverde won stage five and went into the final day's individual time trial as the race leader, albeit on the same time as Cannondale–Drapac's Rigoberto Urán and Michael Woods, AG2R La Mondiale's Romain Bardet, and UAE Team Emirates' Louis Meintjes, along with having just a three-second advantage over Contador. In the time trial, Valverde finished second on the day to Primož Roglič of LottoNL–Jumbo by just nine seconds, and he beat Contador by fourteen seconds, extending his overall lead, and giving Valverde his third stage race victory of the season.
  He punctuated his dominance in La Flèche Wallonne by winning the race for the fourth consecutive year and the fifth time overall. A few days later in Liège–Bastogne–Liège, Valverde fended off a late attack from Dan Martin and managed to outsprint him at the line and take his fourth win in the event. After taking time off from racing to train at a 25-day altitude camp at Sierra Nevada, Valverde raced in the Critérium du Dauphiné, where in the stage four time trial he clocked the third best time, losing out only to world time trial champion Tony Martin (Team Katusha–Alpecin) and BMC Racing Team's Richie Porte by twelve and twenty-four seconds respectively. He managed to put time into the rest of his general classification rivals, including Contador, Bardet, and most notably, defending champion Chris Froome (Team Sky). Over the subsequent mountain stages, Valverde was consistently aggressive, however it failed to pay off and by the end of the Dauphiné he was 4 minutes 8 seconds down on Astana's Jakob Fuglsang, in ninth place overall. Going into the Tour de France, Valverde stated that he would work for his teammate Nairo Quintana, however he was still considered an outside bet for the final podium by many pundits. On the opening individual time trial stage, Valverde crashed on a tight corner and was forced to abandon the Tour immediately; his first Grand Tour withdrawal since 2006. He suffered a fractured kneecap, ruling him out for several months. Ultimately, Valverde opted to end his 2017 season because of his knee injury with the hope of making his comeback at the start of the 2018 season.
caption: Valverde during Stage 1 of the 2017 Tour de France, shortly before a crash which ended his involvement in the race and cut short his season.
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