Paul Seixas' Tour de France debut shows cycling can no longer afford patience

Cycling, like life, wasn’t always in this much of a hurry. Like Paul Seixas, Jacques Anquetil was 19 years old when he made the front page of L’Équipe for the first time. It was the autumn of 1953, and he had just won the Grand Prix des Nations, roughly equivalent to becoming world time trial champion today.

But even though the youngster from Rouen marked himself out that rainy afternoon in the Chevreuse Valley as the coming man of French cycling, he would have to wait four more years to make his Tour de France debut. And even then, the headline story in France was that three-time champion Louison Bobet had decided against racing in July.

Indeed, when Bobet let slip during the 1957 Giro d’Italia that he wouldn’t ride the Tour, L’Équipe’s correspondent Jacques Augendre initially wanted to delay reporting the news by a day in the hope the veteran might reflect and change his mind. 

That plan was thwarted when Jacques Marchand, a colleague back in the office in Paris, informed him that the correspondent for radio station Europe 1 had already relayed the news to France. 

The editorial confabs that followed are documented by Marchand in his 2007 biography of Anquetil, Le Rebelle. The Tour was raced by national teams in those days, and France suddenly needed a new leader. 

Anquetil’s selection was confirmed with rather less fanfare than that of Seixas. When the time came, national coach Marcel Bidot scrawled ten names, including Anquetil’s, on the back of a packet of cigarettes and handed it to L’Équipe’s head of cycling Pierre Chany after a game of cards in a hotel bar. Social media clearly meant something very different back then.

Almost two decades later, after Anquetil had retired with five Tour victories to his name, a young Breton called Bernard Hinault began to pick up notices for his powerful displays as an amateur. He turned pro in 1975 at the then relatively young age of 20, but Hinault would wait until his fourth season in the peloton before taking on the Tour.

And waiting is the operative word. When Hinault was a neo-pro, his directeur sportif Jean Stablinski wanted him to ride the Tour “even if he’s falling apart,” reasoning that the youngster’s debut would gather useful publicity for his Gitane team regardless of how he fared.

As William Fotheringham recounted in his 2015 book, Bernard Hinault and the Fall and Rise of French Cycling, the Badger was adamant that he would not race in July. “In the Dauphiné, my goal was to show my directeur sportif that I wasn’t capable of riding the Tour,” Hinault said.

At season’s end, Stablinski would be replaced by Cyrille Guimard, and Hinault’s Tour debut now became a long-term project. Even when Hinault won Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Dauphiné in 1977, Guimard resisted intense media pressure to send his protégé to the Tour. 

Incidentally, Hinault did sample the Tour that July, but only by performing recons of the stages for television. He would ride it for keeps in 1978, on the back of Vuelta victory that spring. As for Anquetil in 1957, Hinault’s first Tour yielded the first of a record five victories.

“He was on the verge of a great career if he was guided well, with patience, and without going too quickly,” Guimard said of the decision to withhold Hinault from the Tour until he was almost 24 years old.

In the 2020s, by contrast, patience is a luxury that is no longer permitted. On Monday, Paul Seixas confirmed what already seemed a certainty from the moment he scorched the earth at the Faun-Ardêche Classic in February: he will make his Tour debut this July and, even though he is still only 19 years of age, he will not ride simply as a learning exercise. 

“Paul will start in Barcelona with real ambitions to achieve the best possible result in the general classification,” Decathlon CMA CGM team manager Dominique Serieys said.

That kind of ambition is simply a reality of 2020s cycling, as Matteo Tosatto told us recently when we wondered whether Tudor’s own young French talent, Mathys Rondel, would ride his debut Giro with a view to learning the ropes of three-week racing. “In modern cycling, unfortunately, it’s not even in the vocabulary anymore to go to a race just to get experience,” Tosatto explained.

Comparing Seixas’ decision to ride his first Tour at 19 with Anquetil and Hinault’s later debuts is moot in many respects. It’s a nice historical diversion to lay out their approaches side by side, of course, but 21st century cycling is too different in too many ways to suggest Anquetil and Hinault’s development should serve as precise models for Seixas. 

Just as there are limitations in weighing up the competing GOAT claims of Eddy Merckx and Tadej Pogačar, it is difficult to draw firm lessons from the past regarding Decathlon’s haste to send Seixas to the Tour.

Time will eventually tell us if the decision is a wise one or not – but not this July, regardless of how Seixas fares at the Tour. In truth, we’ll probably only really be able to judge in a decade or so’s time, when we will have seen how Seixas’ career and life have unfolded under such intense scrutiny. 

The arguments for and against sending Seixas to the Tour this year have already been well documented. His rapid development this year, including victories at Itzulia Basque Country and Flèche Wallonne and a duel with Pogačar at Liège-Bastogne-Liège, have already marked Seixas out as one of the very best riders in the peloton. The adage in modern cycling is that if a rider is good enough, then he’s old enough, and Seixas’ Tour selection is entirely in line with that thinking.

On the other hand, at 19 years, 9 months and 10 days, Seixas will be the youngest man to ride the Tour since Adrien Cento in 1937. Cycling has changed markedly through the generations, but for almost a century, received wisdom largely warned against sending teenagers to ride three-week races. 

Then again, Juan Ayuso was just shy of his 19th birthday when he placed third on the 2022 Vuelta a España, and there is no real sense that such an early start has stunted his development since.

The nagging question regarding Seixas’ Tour debut isn’t so much whether it’s the right call, it’s whether Decathlon are doing it for the right reasons. Although Seixas is under contract with the team until the end of 2027, his future with Decathlon is already the subject of much discussion.

His agent Joona Laukka told Daniel Benson earlier this year that Seixas was in no hurry to discuss an extension with Decathlon or, indeed, a move elsewhere. Meanwhile, UAE Team Emirates-XRG have made no secret of their desire to acquire Seixas’ services. Last December, Seixas’ 17-year-old brother Nino spent a week training with UAE at the invitation of sports manager Joxean Matxin Fernandez.

Most strikingly, the Tour organisation itself has been very publicly lobbying for Seixas to make his debut this year. Director Christian Prudhomme, usually judicious in his statements, has been talking up the prospect all spring, giving lie to the traditional idea that the Tour makes the riders and not vice-versa. 

But Pogačar’s dominance hasn’t been good for suspense the past two Julys, and that’s rarely good for business. The presence of Seixas will be a relief for ASO and their sponsors too, especially when the Tour will be vying for eyeballs against the World Cup this summer.

Against that backdrop, Decathlon were perhaps never likely to push back against Seixas’ desire to ride the Tour. The team might also have their own reasons for sending him there, with marquee 2026 signing Olav Kooij yet to race in their colours due to illness. 

Seixas, regardless of his readiness, will guarantee wall-to-wall coverage for Decathlon CMA CGM in July, as France heaps all its hopes firmly on the young phenomenon. Even Thibaut Pinot could usually share that burden with Romain Bardet, and vice-versa. For Seixas, there will be nothing to dampen the clamour around him. 

France is 41 years and counting without a Tour winner, but for better or for worse, modern cycling is an impatient kind of place.