Paul Seixas is good for the Tour de France – but is the Tour de France good for him?

Cyrille Guimard isn’t always right, but he’s never wrong. He certainly knows a thing or two about introducing young riders to the rigours of the Tour de France. Bernard Hinault, Laurent Fignon and Greg LeMond all made their debuts under his tutelage, and all three would go on to become multiple winners of the race.

With Paul Seixas set to make his Tour debut this year at just 19, it was only natural that Breton newspaper Le Télégramme would seek out Guimard’s counsel on the momentous occasion for their Ravito podcast. 

As a directeur sportif, after all, Guimard famously resisted calls for a young Hinault to ride the 1977 Tour, and he wasn’t swayed even when his rider overcame a crash on descent of the Col de Porte to win an indelible edition of the Dauphiné.

That patience was rewarded a year later when Hinault claimed the first of his five Tour victories. Times have changed, of course, and riders turn pro earlier than before, but in Guimard’s view, the fundamentals of the game are still the same.

“With Hinault, when we decided not to do the Tour in 1977, we had exactly the same pressure that was placed on Seixas, but together with Bernard, we said no,” Guimard said. “The Tour de France isn’t the Four Days of Dunkirk. When you have talent like that, you don’t go to the Tour to learn – you go there to win.”

Even though Guimard believes Seixas can finish as high as second overall this time – “If you just take the data, he’s among the best three riders there” – he maintains that he would have been better served by developing for another year before taking on Tadej Pogacar in 2027.

But whether Seixas wins the Tour at the first attempt or not is less of a concern for Guimard than the long-term consequences of taking on cycling’s greatest challenge at such a young age. While Seixas’ power numbers show that he is physically ready for the Tour, that doesn’t inure him to the risk of burnout later on.

“The question you might ask is this: is it worth him doing it?” Guimard said. “I always say that you don’t waste time by being patient. At 19, it wasn’t a pressing priority to do the Tour. But there are interests that go beyond the sporting sphere and perhaps beyond even the human sphere…”

Seixas’ astounding progress across the spring generated considerable excitement in France, and nobody, it seems, was immune to overt displays of enthusiasm about his performances. Even the director of the Tour de France got in on the act, with Christian Prudhomme lobbying openly for Seixas to line up in July.

It was striking, and not only because Prudhomme had so often offered a sober and restrained voice over the years. Such come-and-get-me pleas are habitual for the directors of the Giro and the Vuelta, but the Tour has traditionally seen itself as being above making cloying, public appeals for individual riders to take part. In Guimard’s view, Seixas has already been commodified, with ASO believing this asset will ultimately add to their bottom line.

“He’ll be in the headlines every day, whether he’s at the front or the back, because it’s clear that ASO needed him,” Guimard said. “After five years with the same two riders in the top two, ASO want to boost the viewing figures, it’s in their interest to do so. And Paul Seixas is a consumer product…”

Seixas’s presence is good for the Tour, in other words, but is it good for him?

From the outside, it’s impossible to say how much that thought weighed on the decision-making process at Decathlon CMA CGM. After a fine debut season, Seixas declared himself open to the idea of making his Tour debut in 2026. That ambition is more than understandable for a young man in a hurry, but one would imagine his team would have preached a degree of caution.

Sensibly, they elected to kick the can down the road, decreeing that no decision on Seixas’ Grand Tour plans would be taken until after Liège-Bastogne-Liège. But once the season began and Seixas started scorching the earth, the external clamour for him to ride the Tour rose accordingly.

After his win at the Ardèche Classic in February, L’Équipe put him on the front page ahead of Paris-Saint-Germain and the French rugby team. By the time he won Itzulia Basque Country in April, the Amaury-owned newspaper was pushing more openly, putting him on the cover in the leader’s jersey with the headline: “Yellow suits him so well.”

Decathlon, one presumes, focused on Seixas’ performance data rather than the outside noise when they made their decision to send him to the Tour, and his tête-à-tête with Pogacar at Liège-Bastogne-Liège certainly indicated that he might fare very well indeed in July.

But nothing in cycling happens in a vacuum. While Seixas was pushing ever closer to Pogacar out on the road, reports began to circulate that UAE Team Emirates-XRG were interested in securing his services as the world champion’s eventual successor.

Seixas’ existing contract expires in 2027, and the rider and his agent Joona Laukka have so far resisted Decathlon manager Dominique Serieys’ intention to begin talks on a long-term extension. Barely a week goes by without a new suitor entering the Seixas sweepstakes and a new figure being touted as his asking price.

Against that backdrop, Serieys might not have felt himself in a position to push back on Seixas’ desire to ride this year’s Tour even had he wished to do so. His predecessor Vincent Lavenu, as team owner, might have felt he had a strong enough hand to decide on sporting and human considerations alone. For Serieys, an employee of Decathlon, the wider business and commercial picture is surely difficult to ignore.

Sending Seixas to the Tour certainly wouldn’t harm Decathlon’s vision of selling a Van Rysel bike to every dreaming kid and weekend warrior in France for the next decade. In that light, keeping the team’s young star happy and on board beyond 2027 is surely at the top of Serieys’ to do list right now.

Whatever the thinking behind the decision, Seixas will start the 2026 Tour, despite his crash at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. Indeed, there is a school of thought that the incident and Seixas’ subsequent abandon might ultimately have done him a favour. Seixas entered the race as the favourite for overall victory and winning the rebranded Dauphiné would only have heightened home expectations for July still further. 

“That crash means he can head into the Tour a bit more relaxed,” teammate Sander De Pestel told Het Nieuwsblad. “The team went into the Tour Auvergne assuming we’d win easily, and the media hyped it up too. But they forgot that a certain [Isaac] Del Toro was also on the start line. 

“If he’d won that race by several minutes and then finished, say, eighth in the Tour, there would probably have been some criticism. Now expectations have been lowered a bit.”

But De Pestel’s description of the crash as a “blessing” isn’t limited to external expectation. He also wondered if Seixas had been doing too much too soon in his preparations for the Tour. In May, for instance, he reportedly amassed 48,000m of total climbing at a training camp in Sierra Nevada and then clocked up a Strava KOM on the Tourmalet during a Tour recon. 

It’s not entirely clear if anybody was gently pressing the 19-year-old to temper his workload a little, but the effects of the crash led to an enforced – and seemingly needed – rest period in the days after the Dauphiné.

“It’s forced him to rein himself in a bit. He was already training so hard back in May that I thought: the Tour is still a long way off…” De Pestel said. “Now, whether he likes it or not, he’s had to take a break, and that could turn out well.”

The picture De Pestel paints is not an unusual one. Seixas, it seems, is a headstrong young rider who might occasionally need protecting from himself, like other talents before him, Pogacar, Del Toro and Remco Evenepoel included. Unlike Seixas, however, none of those riders raced the Tour as a teenager with the hopes of a nation upon them. Indeed, their teams all made a point of having them make their Grand Tour debuts elsewhere before tackling La Grande Boucle.

Seixas, by contrast, will be just 19 years, 9 months and 10 days old when he rolls down the start ramp in Barcelona on Saturday to become the youngest Tour participant since Adrien Cento in 1937. And Seixas will not be racing in anonymity, but with an expectant French public turning their lonely eyes to him to bridge the 41-year-gap to Hinault’s 1985 victory. 

As his composed and intelligent media performances demonstrate, Seixas is no ordinary 19-year-old, and he seems better equipped than most to cope with the psychological demands that await. Even so, he will quickly learn that the scrutiny at the Tour is a different beast to anything he has encountered to this point.

On a physical level, and despite the obvious questions over lasting the course in the third week, Seixas seems able for the rigours ahead. And there will be voices with Tour-winning experience around him too, including road captain Tiesj Benoot and lead sports director Luke Rowe. 

Then again, maybe that’s trouble. Everything is in place for Seixas to have a very successful 2026 Tour. But even if he reaches Paris in the yellow jersey, it might be several years too soon to say if it was the right decision for him to race it in the first place.

Also read:
Remco Evenepoel's Tour de France is a referendum on his future
One battle after another: Vingegaard still leads resistance to Pogacar at the Tour
How the ghosts of Pogacar's Tour past and future are driving him