Paul Seixas is going to the Tour de France. The decision was taken last week and shared today. It always seemed likely but question of his participation as an ongoing story shows how he’ll face a lot of attention.
Should Paul Seixas ride the Tour de France? The question has been doing the rounds since last year’s Tour de France. The Decathlon-Ag2r La Mondiale last summer included Bastien Tronchon who remarked one day to the team boss Dominique Serieys that as often as he’d been told the Tour de France is bigger and harder than anything else on the calendar, it was only by experiencing this for himself that he could understand this. Based on this Serieys told France’s RMC Radio he was minded to take Seixas to the Tour de France already, the thinking being that he might well serve some kind of apprenticeship in July.
RMC’s long time pundit Cyrille Guimard has taken a different position. When he took over the Renault team in the 1970s he quickly became a leading team manager and after convincing Bernard Hinault to turn pro with the team in 1975, then convinced Hinault to only start the Tour de France when he was ready to win it, thus serving three years as an apprentice and then winning the 1978 Tour. That was a long time ago but Guimard and others have returned to it.
When the 2026 Tour de France route was revealed, France’s Vélo magazine did not put the map on their front cover but Seixas instead, along with the question of whether he should ride. Because if question was the same, the answer was changing as Seixas had finished in the top-10 in Lombardia, going head to head with the best of the rest behind Pogačar on the final climb of the day. Plus he’d been third in European championships behind Pogačar and Evenepoel.
All this got amplified this spring, first following his second place in the Strade Bianche and then the rest in April: winning the Itzulia Basque Country and the Flèche Wallonne and then being second to Pogačar in Liège-Bastogne-Liège. His climbing performances in the Basque Country were at level superior to those deployed by Jonas Vingegaard in Catalunya. Comparing two brief data points requires more than a cautionary pinch of salt, but you can see how what we and his team know about Paul Seixas has changed significantly since last July.
One observation is this was Paul Seixas’s decision. Listen to his comments on the subject in recent weeks and he’d reply in the first person, as in “I will decide” and not “we”, although he did also speak of discussions with the team. This was not a note of rebellion nor trying to create a fait accompli, just confidence.
Seixas’s contractual future is up for grabs too. This blog’s piece “The Race For Paul Seixas” argued he is the central rider on the market right now, and since posting it in early March it’s even more so, some phrases conditional tense or reservations feel more secure now. Which is why if Seixas wants to ride the Tour then his team are hardly going to say non to him, for fear of an argument with him that pushes him to walk away to a new team. As an aside here, every team would like to sign him and it suits UAE to make the right noises and winks in the media as this alone entrenches their position as the top team who get to shape the future; but the likes of Netcompany-Ineos arguably need Seixas more.
You can see why Seixas decided to go to the Tour. Imagine if you were 19, really into your cycling and had just won the Basque Country and rode everyone off your wheel except Pogačar this spring: what would you fancy doing this July? Imagine if Seixas was a rapper, would he turn down the chance to go on stage with Jay-Z at the Yankee Stadium this July? If he was a tennis player, would he decline to play at Rolland Garros? Doubt it.
A further thing is Seixas is fascinated by Pogačar, the Slovenian is his model. When Pogačar was winning his second Tour, Seixas was a 14 year old watching the Tour on TV. Pogačar’s attitude to the sport, including racing the cobbled classics, is something Seixas wants to emulate too. It’s partly why Seixas was swapping turns with Pogačar after La Redoute on the roads to Liège, it’s because he yearns to race with him.
One difference to Pogačar is the Slovenian surprised us on the way up, including his first Tour de France win when Roglič looked like the likely winner, even on the morning of the penultimate stage. Similarly it took a while for the Merckx vs. Pogačar debate to get going too. Perhaps it’s due to Pogačar as a pioneer but the rise of Seixas seems to be a steeper trajectory, at least in expectations.
One thing the rise of Pogačar but also plenty of others has shown is that any apprenticeship these days is different. Many were wondering if Seixas could cope with a 250km Monument in Liège but he’d managed in Lombardia last year and the Worlds and Euros were long races too. He knows better than most that you just have to eat and eat at the prescribed rate for the event. There’s more to it but a lot of the lore and experience required to handle long races has been cast aside in recent years. So handling a three week race is not the test of stamina and grit it once was.
All this though circles back to the Tronchon-Serieys conversation. As much as Seixas readies himself for the Tour, it’ll still blow his mind to take to the start. Cyrille Guimard used to point out that wearing the yellow jersey each day at the Tour cost a rider an hour in extra media time and the extension of this was one hour’s less sleep a day, so in a week that equated to a whole night’s lost sleep. This works better as a rapid-fire remark on radio than a paragraph of text but you get the point: the daily media round and other duties can sap a rider. Paul Seixas will likely face similar demands in July from the French media alone and risks being as tired as the race leader… assuming it is someone else.
Seixas is going for “discovery” and “to aim for the best GC possible”, he’s not going to sit tight and then see about a stage win. This is probably the right formula, ambitious but open-minded, if the best result turns out to be seventh place in Paris, or even 77th, then so be it.
The challenges ahead are as much for the Decathlon-CMA CGM team as Seixas. Some of the thinking around Seixas’ Tour debut had revolved around taking him to the Tour to discover the race, but with the pressure firmly on new hire Olav Kooij’s shoulders for sprint wins. Only the Dutchman is only just beginning to resume riding after a lingering viral infection and so who knows if he’ll be able to do the Tour de France?
If Kooij is absent then so is his train or this is redeployed as a bodyguard service for Seixas, or engines for the team time trial. Suddenly they’re putting a lot of eggs in his basket. Riders like Jordan Labrosse have thrived this season by riding in his service. But can they do this at the Tour de France? One thing the team needs to do – and is doing reportedly doing with Pavel Sivakov – is to hire extra help.
In the meantime Seixas will race once at the Dauphiné/Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes in June find a route to suit, more so since Remco Evenepoel has opted not to ride it today too.
Conclusion
There are arguments for and against but Seixas has decided and you can see why he wants to do it, and why the team is supportive. But blog posts like this and the flood of other articles reinforce the point that his every move and utterance between now and July will be tracked closely.