The eternal Alejandro Valverde already sets an expiration date

From Cabo de Gata, by videoconference, Alejandro Valverde affirms that this year, 2021, will be his last as a professional cyclist, the 20th year of a career that began almost at the beginning of the century.

"I will try to be in the Tokyo Games and then in the Vuelta," says the Murcian, who will turn 41 on April 25.

"And the rest of the year I will give my all for the team and if I get a win, all the better."

Giving everything for the team is, in the words of Eusebio Unzue, the director, even more eternal than Valverde, consists of continuing to support the kids for another year, who are no longer so young, and already have to be leaders.

It is Marc Soler, 27 years old now, who will debut as the sole boss in the Giro, and it is Enric Mas, 26, who after his fifth places in the Tour and in the 2020 Vuelta has set the goal of climbing into the Tour drawer, at least in 2021.

In both races he will share responsibilities with the great signing of the year, the Colombian Miguel Ángel

López, 27, who intervened from Madrid, where, positive for covid, he is quarantined.

They are old cyclists for what they are now, runners not specifically climbers but who climb well, with power, total watts, with good muscles and weight, and counter-clock better, the Roglic, Pogacar, Hirschi or Van Aert models.

"I have to improve a lot in the time trial," admits Superman, from Boyacá with a magnificent power-to-weight ratio thanks to his thinness.

"I will have to work a lot with Patxi Vila, the performance manager, and get on the goat a lot."

If it does not have as much name as Superman, the signing of Iván García Cortina, a 25-year-old Asturian, big and very strong, who dreams of the Paris-Roubaix stones since childhood, does represent an important cultural change in the history of the Unzue's team, which since its time as Reynolds trusted all its objectives to stage events, although phenomena like Valverde, who won everywhere, allowed it to expand its range.

The pure classicists were, however, never liked.

That is why they never signed Óscar Freire and his faithful Pedro Horrillo;

that is why Juan Antonio Flecha had to emigrate.

But 2021 arrives and Unzue warns that he is willing to fill the void of the team in the pave classics, in the Roubaix and Flandes monuments, and that is why he has signed the talented and very fast, almost sprinter, García Cortina, to lead a dedicated section 100 percent to the March-April flamenco.

"The appointment I don't want to miss is Paris-Roubaix," promises the runner from Gijón, trained in the Deceuninck quarry and who returns to Spain after three years in Bahrain.

"I missed it last year because it was suspended due to the pandemic, so I hope this year it will be done."