Alejandro Valverde will skip the Tour de France and compete in the Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a España in 2022, his final season as a professional rider.

Valverde outlined the program on Wednesday when he spoke with reporters in Sangueza, where Movistar announced plans to become the WorldTour's first carbon-neutral team.

The 41-year-old will also compete in the Ardennes Classics in his final campaign, looking to extend his record of five wins in Flèche Wallonne and four in Liège-Bastogne-Liège. He finished third in Flèche and fourth in Liège this year, but was unable to match the winner, Tadey Pogachar (UAE Team Emirates), in the five-man sprint competition.

Valverde's Giro appearance came in 2016, when he won stage 16 in Andalo and finished third overall; in the 2021 Vuelta, he crashed heavily on stage 7 and abandoned the race.

He won the overall title at the 2009 Vuelta, but the season before that he was belatedly suspended for two years for his involvement in Operacion Puerto's blood doping investigation.

According to Ciclismo a Fondo (opens in new tab), Valverde said, "I want to enjoy every race and be competitive." [Valverde will miss the Tour de France for the first time since 2011, when he was suspended for doping. Enric Mas, who has finished fifth and sixth overall in the last two Tours, will lead the overall battle for Movistar in July.

Mas, Valverde, and Movistar women riders Lourdes Oyarbide and Sara Martín attended a ceremony in Sangueza on Wednesday to celebrate a joint project with Volvo, Forestmatic, and the Liftera Foundation to build 1 hectare of The event marked the planting of 1,000 trees on the land.

Movistar claims that the tree planting will help neutralize about 200 tons of CO2 over the next 40 years, offsetting the team's carbon footprint of 176 tons from the 2019 season, the last full campaign before the coronavirus pandemic.

In June 2020, the team announced that it aims to be the first cycling team to achieve 100 percent sustainability, and plans to install solar panels on the team headquarters and switch the team car to a hybrid.

Director Eusebio Unzue described the reforestation project as "an important step toward becoming a 100 percent sustainable cycling team."