Seixas' astounding Il Lombardia triumph owed as much to the head as the legs

The sun dripped down like honey on Como on Saturday afternoon, and all along the lakeshore, the leaves had turned the shade of golden brown that L’Équipe journalist Philippe Brunel used to refer to as mordoré. 

On the hills above town, meanwhile, Paul Seixas was gradually toasting some of the best riders in the world, burning them remorselessly off his wheel as he cruised to an emphatic triumph at Il Lombardia. 

The backdrop was reassuringly familiar, but the race offered up something dazzlingly new. That said, we will very quickly get used to Seixas exhibitions like this. Across his two short years in the peloton, the Frenchman has seemed to improve exponentially, and his astounding Il Lombardia victory was simply in keeping with the steep upward trajectory of his career.

Although Seixas turned 20 a little over two weeks ago, he is still setting all kinds of records of precocity. Victory here in Como made him the youngest winner in the history of Il Lombardia, and the fourth-youngest victor in a Monument Classic.

It was his eighth victory of the season, and his sixth in the WorldTour. It was his second Classic win, and his first at a Monument. But those numbers tell only a part of the story.

Tadej Pogačar, absent in Il Lombardia, was again the outstanding rider of the season in 2026, but the most thrilling storyline of the year was Seixas’ rapid progression. The year began with a will-he-won’t-he saga over his participation in the Tour de France, and it ends with another indication that he is the coming man, the rider most likely to threaten Pogačar’s hegemony in the seasons ahead.

Seixas’ strength relative to Pogačar has been parsed and analysed across the whole season, starting with Strade Bianche in March, when the youngster had the temerity to track the Slovenian when he attacked on Monte Sante Marie, and the sangfroid to check out before he went too far into the red.

By Liège-Bastogne-Liège in late April, Seixas had drawn closer to Pogačar, matching him on La Redoute before eventually conceding near the top of the Roche-aux-Fauçons. That performance made his Tour debut an inevitability, and although Seixas never occupied the same postcode as Pogačar in July, fourth place in Paris suggested that he might soon be able to afford the rent. 

Although Pogačar has been absent through injury in the final weeks of the season, he remains the invisible yardstick for Seixas. On Saturday, the amateur sleuths were again diligently comparing climbing times and power-to-weight estimates, measuring the challenger against the man routinely described as the GOAT.

In purely physical terms, there is no real competition, of course, at least for now, as Seixas himself acknowledged when he took a seat at the press conference in Como’s Palazzo Terragni on Saturday evening. “Without Tadej, it’s not the same race,” he pointed out when asked to compare his performance here with his second place behind Pogačar in Liège. “To beat Tadej would be something else again. Maybe I will beat him some day, or maybe I will never beat him. But I will always try, of course.”

Later in the press conference, Seixas politely pressed back against the idea that victory against Isaac del Toro, Remco Evenepoel et al in Como meant that he was now the prime challenger to Pogačar’s crown. Cycling is not boxing; beating the rest here doesn’t automatically put Seixas ahead of them in the hierarchy.

“Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose,” he said. “One race doesn’t make you better than others.”

Only time will tell if Il Lombardia proves to be a stage on the way to greatness, as it was for his compatriot Bernard Hinault in 1979, or the crowning moment of his career, as it was for Gilles Délion in 1990 before health problems and the misfortune to race in the EPO era robbed him of his destiny.

But in the here and now, Seixas’ winning move on the Civiglio was stunning in its execution. The youngster launched a searing, seated acceleration with 19km to go that only Tom Pidcock and Giulio Ciccone could follow, and then he gradually dialled up the intensity until they, too, had to relent.

Hicham El Guerrouj used to run the 1500m in a similar way, setting out at a speed just tempting enough for his rivals to follow and then cruelly ratcheting up the pace every 200m or so until all strength had been slowly drained from their legs. Both Pidcock and Ciccone told a similar tale of woe at the finish, rueing how they had been lured into going beyond their limits in following Seixas on the Civiglio.

But Seixas’ combination of physical strength and tactical acumen was only part of the equation here. The context in which he won might have been the most impressive part of his afternoon.

Without the five-time winner Pogačar in the field, this edition of Il Lombardia provided a clear chance for Seixas to write his own piece of history, but he had already held a similar opportunity at the World Championships in Montreal only to be thwarted by cramp on the final lap of the race.

The French team had initially controlled the race on Seixas’ behalf, setting a supersonic pace on the first four laps of the finishing circuit, and he was unsparing in his self-assessment when he rolled home a disconsolate 15th. “A disgrace,” was Seixas’ bracing description of his efforts.

It was jarring to hear a 20-year-old offer up such harsh and public self-criticism, and one worried about the effect the episode would have on his psyche going forward. 

Seixas, however, seems to be built differently, and maybe we should have guessed as much after the poise he showed amid all the scrutiny and expectation he faced in July. 

Rather than exacerbating the impact of his setback in Montreal, Seixas’ outburst seemed to lance the boil. By his reckoning, his disappointment became less harmful by talking about it out loud. “Sometimes you have to get the thing on your heart out so you can move on to something else,” he said.

All year long, Seixas has been moving on to something else, and Saturday’s show of strength was simply his latest leap forward. Seixas ended his season on a high here, but all signs suggest he will keep on climbing in 2027.