Beaten but unbowed: Seixas adds another chapter with Dauphiné defiance

This was a day that started terribly for Paul Seixas and risked getting worse, before a remarkable fightback was followed by a stirring show of damage limitation. 

It’s not yet clear if Seixas lost the rebranded Dauphiné on Saturday, but whatever the final outcome, this race will ultimately only have burnished his growing reputation before he makes his Tour de France debut next month. 

In cycling, as in life, the most essential things can’t be measured in numbers. After all the excitement generated by Seixas' watts per kilo this spring, his attitude was the story here.

When Seixas crashed heavily a little over 30km into stage 7, it initially looked as though his Dauphiné challenge was over. Although he managed to remount and resume, his kit was torn and his pedalling was gingerly at first. 

Three minutes passed before Seixas got back on his bike, and his deficit to the yellow jersey group would yawn out towards four minutes before he formally settled down to the business of trying to chase back on.

At that point, Seixas was giving serious consideration to climbing off and switching his attention to training for the Tour. “It was pretty much over by then, so I thought to myself, ‘The race is over; I can go home and get back to work,’” Seixas confessed at the finish line.

There were no concessions from Seixas’ rivals, with UAE Team Emirates-XRG and Visma among the teams keeping the pace high in the peloton. Seixas’ teammate Léo Bisiaux would criticise their response after the stage, but even within the ambiguous confines of cycling’s unwritten rules, it’s not really clear that he had a case.

After all, Seixas had, by his own admission, been at fault for the crash, which took place when he had tried to pass on the outside at speed on a descent. When he crashed, the race simply thundered on without him. The curriculum at cycling’s school of hard knocks has always been made up of lessons like this.

In any case, Seixas wasn’t in any mood to complain. His Decathlon CMA CGM teammates were shuttled back one by one to help with the pursuit, and he eventually closed the gap to two minutes on the Lacets du Grand Colombier before catching up to the yellow jersey group ahead of the penultimate climb of the Col de Richemond.

At the time, it looked as though the afternoon might carry echoes of Milan-Sanremo and Tadej Pogacar’s remarkable fightback after his crash ahead of the Cipressa. But for all Seixas’ undoubted talent, some miracles aren’t (yet) in his repertoire. Give it time.

Once the steep haul up the Grand Colombier began, Seixas began to lose contact with the front group, and it was clear that he was about to pay a price for his crash and for his long, long pursuit. The only question was how much.

Seixas had already showcased his ability this year, dominating the Ardèche Classic, scorching the earth at Itzulia Basque Country and nonchalantly winning Flèche Wallonne. The Grand Colombier, by contrast, was a different kind of examination, a test of Seixas’ resolve. 

He explained afterwards that he had barely been able to grip the handlebars all afternoon after skidding along the tarmac for 30 metres. Adrenaline had helped him in his 60km pursuit. Now on the final mountain, with Del Toro, Juan Ayuso and Matteo Jorgenson pressing on ahead, Seixas could only lean on his defiance.

It carried him a long way. Yes, Seixas would concede 1:21 to Del Toro by the summit, and he would lose just under a minute to Ayuso and 40 seconds to Jorgenson. He would ‘only’ take seventh on the stage, behind riders like Tobias Halland Johannessen and Cian Uijtdebroeks. 

Taken out of context, it hardly augurs well for Seixas’ prospects against Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard at the Tour. But in the circumstances, after a heavy crash and a frantic pursuit, it was a remarkable display from a 19-year-old in only his second season as a pro.

It leaves him sixth overall, 1:54 down on Tuckwell and over a minute behind Del Toro and Jorgenson ahead of the Dauphiné’s mammoth final stage to Plateau de Solaison. Although Seixas sounded a bullish note about Sunday’s denouement, the smart money would probably be on Del Toro to land his third WorldTour stage race victory of the year. Then again, the final day of the Dauphiné is often one of the wildest on the calendar. Nothing is ever fully off the table.

But whatever the outcome, Seixas’ performance on Saturday, on and off the bike, will linger long in the memory. The spirited chase was followed by a determined climb and then an emotional sight at the finish line, where an exhausted Seixas collapsed onto the tarmac, only to be helped onto his feet by his father. 

Seixas, inevitably, was awarded the prize as the day’s most combative rider. In the mixed zone afterwards, he spoke with a maturity that belied his 19 years, admonishing himself for the crash, praising his teammates for their help and insisting that he had no reason to be proud of his own performance.

It was an occasion that will draw inevitable comparisons with the day Bernard Hinault crashed into a ravine on the descent of the Col de Porte on the 1977 Dauphiné. The Breton remounted and won that day in Grenoble, but only after he briefly got off his bike on the final haul up the Col de la Bastille, his nerves still jangling from the shock of the crash. 

Seixas didn’t win the day, but the defiance was familiar. The Col de Porte was one of the foundations of the Hinault legend. In his book Forcenés, a stylised account of cycling history, the writer Philippe Bordas described that incident as a “violent birth,” the day that Hinault truly became Hinault.

It’s a stretch at this point to say the same of Seixas, of course, but Saturday afternoon will have done nothing to dampen the hype and expectation in his home nation ahead of his Tour debut. Seixas is no longer the favourite to win the Dauphiné, but his very presence makes the final stage essential viewing.