The quality of Alejandro Valverde (Movistar) came to the fore againtoday at a critical moment of the 2013 Vuelta a España. The 'race of the truth', the only individual time trial in this year's Spanish Grand Tour, over 39km in and around Tarazona, was about to spoil the Movistar Team leader's chances when a puncture on his front wheel got in his way after just ten minutes of effort.

Quickly assisted by his team car, the Spaniard got back fast into racing mode and his will to keep progressing in the overall classification put him close to Nibali -only 27 seconds down at the finish- and 4 seconds down on Roche (Saxo-Tinkoff) as he beat Joaquím Rodríguez (Katusha) by 1’09” and former race leader Chris Horner (RadioShack-Leopard) by 1’02” for an excellent 7th, just 1’52” behind Horner’s team mate Fabian Cancellara.

Valverde is now 3rd overall, forty-six seconds behind Nibali and just thirteen seconds after Roche after the day that seemed less than favourable for his chances. The Murcian now looks optimistically towards the big mountains, coming back on Saturday with the Pyrenean stages.

"It was a really great TT for me,” Valverde explained. “I was pretty calm, confident about my chances. At the Haza Llana climb, I didn't have a bad feeling - it was more a matter of distributing my energy well, I had trained a lot over that climb. That's why I knew that I would be doing a good time trial if I had the legs, and that's how it went. It took a bit for me to get into my pace because the tracksuit given by the organisers was a bit too small for me and I couldn't get well over the tri-bars. I was feeling the front wheel was a bit out of air from the very first kilometres and that made me feel uncomfortable and out of focus. After changing it, I was a bit nervous and I couldn't get my foot on the pedal and lost a bit more time. These things happen in sport, and once I fixed it, I got into my pace. Obviously it's sad, because I could have done better, but it was a good TT from my point of view and all the mountains ahead are good for us. The first thing is recovering - then we will start thinking about the next stages and our race strategy."