'You can't learn it in training' - Luke Rowe on Paul Seixas' first professional team time trial

Seixas has won La Flèche Wallonne, the Faun-Ardèche Classic and the GC at the Tour of the Basque Country (including the ITT) in his 2026 season. His Dauphiné appearance is his last race before his Tour de France debut. The stage 3 team time trial is the one event he has never done as a professional.

"That's why we're quite curious about what this will bring," Rowe told Het Nieuwsblad, with the Welshman in the team car for Decathlon CMA CGM after joining the squad in January 2025 following 13 seasons as a rider for Sky and Ineos.

"It's something you can only learn in a race. You can practice, train and recon as much as you want, even on closed circuits, it's never comparable to a race itself. Just because of the speed. In modern cycling, from the start you have to flirt with the limit where your legs explode. You have to constantly feel that something could go wrong at any moment," said Rowe.

"You can't imitate that in training. There you might get the feeling that the team time trial is going well. If you have that feeling in a race, it simply means it's not going fast enough. It mustn't go smoothly. Plus, if you make a mistake during the recon or in training, there are no consequences. If you make a mistake during the race, you pay for it cash by definition. Either you crash, or you lose a lot of time. That feeling, that awareness, is what Paul needs to master," stated Rowe.

Decathlon CMA CGM will start the effort a rider down, with Matthew Riccitello having already abandoned the race through illness. That leaves the team with six riders for a stage that Rowe sees as a valuable test.

For Seixas, it will be a rare experience. His last team time trial before this race came as a junior, when he rode for the Decathlon U19 team and his club VC Villefranche.

Rowe, however, has no doubts about Seixas’s engine against the clock. The French teenager won the individual time trial at the Tour of the Basque Country in April and, at the Volta ao Algarve in February, was beaten only by established specialists such as Filippo Ganna, Juan Ayuso and Jakob Söderqvist.

“Physically, it’s not an issue at all,” Rowe said. “And tactically, we worked a lot on this discipline this winter, including on closed circuits. It’s something we’ll do more of before the Tour as well.”

Rowe knows the discipline well. He rode three team time trials at the Tour de France during his career and never finished outside the top two.

“You don’t get many chances at a team time trial,” he said. “This will be a perfect dress rehearsal.”

The course itself should offer more than a simple power test. The 28.4km route around Le Perreux includes two notable uphill sections towards Coutouvre and Montagny, before a faster final eight kilometres back to the finish. Even the run to the line rises again, with gradients reaching 7% in the final kilometre. Decathlon CMA CGM are scheduled to start at 16:05 CET.