Volta a Catalunya race leader Alejandro Valverde (Movistar) came within a whisker of taking his third stage victory in four days, as the Spaniard rolled back the years and sprinted for the line in Reus on Saturday, narrowly losing out on stage 6 to Daryl Impey (Orica-Scott). After Movistar teammate José Joaquín Rojas led him out, Valverde charged round one side of breakaway Italian duo of Alessandro De Marchi (BMC Racing) and Dario Cataldo (Astana) as they faded within sight of the line. But Impey, having darted around the other side, proved to be just a little faster. Even so, for Valverde, having won on the mountain top finish of Lo Port the day before, taking a second place in a reduced bunch sprint - a specialty in which he used to shine when he turned pro more than a decade ago - was a fine effort. Furthermore, on a stage where Chris Froome (Team Sky), previously second overall, lost more than 25 minutes in the mountains that preceded the long drop down to the finish in Reus, Valverde`s overall lead is now even stronger than it was 24 hours before.ADVERTISEMENT `It was a very hard day, a very fast start, and the race broke apart on the first climb, but not so much on the ascent as on the downhill,` Valverde said afterwards. `It [dropping Froome and co.] wasn`t planned, but we`d been warned that it was very narrow on both sides of the climb and the whole of our team went to the front, just in case something happened.` `Sky were caught out behind, and we got the gap. We only put one rider on the front, Imanol Erviti, but there was a lot of collaboration between all the teams, there was no way they could catch us again.` In the concluding segment of the stage, Valverde said that Movistar had not deliberately worked behind the two late breakaways, `but the group we were in was catching up with them anyway and I went for the sprint.`
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