Being Paul Seixas, the boy king of the Tour de France

BELFORT, France — “Taisez-vous s’il vous plait!” Be quiet, please!

The voice is slightly higher pitched and reedier than might be expected, but Paul Seixas’ intervention is the mark of a veteran. Surrounded by fans at Montjuic, on stage two of the Tour de France’s Catalan Grand Départ, the 19-year-old cannot hear the interview questions over the thrum and fervour of his promise. “Paul! Paul! Seixas!”

He silences them with four polite words; the crowd, entranced, obey. After finishing his duties, Seixas spends five minutes greeting those now permitted to chant his name.

Four days later, in the picturesque surrounds of the Pyrenees’ Cirque du Gavarnie, another crowd interrupts Seixas’ recovery — the entourage of French president Emmanuel Macron, who later calls the teenager “extraordinary”.

“I hope he wins one or more stages,” Macron told France 2. “We’re behind him.”

Seixas had just kept up with some of the world’s best climbers over the fearsome Col du Tourmalet, finishing fifth on the race’s first true mountain stage, yet at the finish, could only express his frustration that he had been unable to win the sprint for third.

He is not that young rider who flies because he is unaware of his own limitations; Seixas is in the fight because he is aware of the magnitude of his gift.

With the race entering Seixas’ home region, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, the youngest men’s Tour rider since World War Two sits sixth in the general classification (GC) — fewer than 30 seconds off the podium.

The Tour is a national symbol — the thoughts of a first French winner in 41 years are wisps of breeze on a muggy evening. This year is not his year, but the next, and the one after that, and then so on? That is the promise Seixas’ debut represents. L’Équipe, the country’s biggest sports newspaper, has already appointed a reporter to concentrate solely on him.

But Seixas wears expectations lightly, fastening them like an amulet around his neck. Behind him, his Decathlon CMA CGM team works relentlessly to minimise that pressure. The cloak fits snugly on his rounded shoulders — this is the boy that would be king.

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Beaujolais is French wine country, with Seixas born in the waning days of the harvest on September 24, 2006. The area’s grapes are known for their lightness, but it means the bottles they produce do not age well — lasting, at the very most, for 15 years. It was entirely appropriate then that the rural department’s biggest sporting star, perhaps ever, should burst forth as a teenager.

Seixas has always been early: the youngest rider in the Tour, the youngest winner of a one-week WorldTour stage race, the youngest champion of the prestigious La Flèche Wallonne.

“I remember a long hike in Valais, Switzerland, when he was two years old,” his father told L’Équipe last month. “He walked until he was exhausted and he loved it. In the mountains, kids sometimes sit down on a rock because they’re fed up. Paul was ahead of us, waiting. In two or three years, he started making lists for Santa Claus, with the peaks around us that he wanted to climb.”

It had been unclear at the start of the season if Seixas would go to the Tour, but the speed of his development meant his participation was barely a question by late spring. He was supercharged over the winter, finishing second to Tadej Pogačar at both Strade Bianche and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, clear of the rest of the field on both occasions.

“I remember, two years ago during the Tour, that one of my colleagues pointed out that this kid was winning races and that maybe we should get to know him,” says L’Équipe journalist Luc Herincx. “Then, when he won the (junior) world title in time trial, that was the first time he was mentioned in the newspaper. But it really became a big thing in June last year with the Critérium du Dauphiné (where he finished eighth).

“It’s been such a long wait since our last Tour win, but also because we had Thibaut Pinot and Romain Bardet in the 2010s, and they’ve retired. They reached their peak almost 10 years ago, and since then we haven’t had any big names in the GC, so there’s been some slack.

“Seixas coming was already some relief, but then when we noticed that he was so good at time trialling, which is something we didn’t even have with Pinot and Bardet, we started thinking that maybe he could be one for the Tour.”

Decathlon were overwhelmed by interview requests for their young star, while L’Équipe made a documentary following him over the 2026 season. Every road led to the Tour, and France’s 41-year drought.

On Stage 13, the race passed through Mélisey, the home village of Pinot, a rider burdened by similar expectations throughout his career, who admitted to burnout and withdrew from the sport. By the end, Pinot told Swiss newspaper Le Temps that he was “glad he did not win the Tour de France”.

Pinot was the future once, and though he emerged on Friday and was feted at the stage start, Seixas’ passage past his farm was both homage and symbolic of precociousness’ danger.

Internally, Decathlon launched a plan to protect their teenage star. Having been known to the team since he was a 15-year-old, Seixas had always been considered different.

“It was his mentality, his way of being in his daily life,” explained one team source, speaking anonymously to manage the pressure around his rider. “As soon as we said something to Paul, he immediately remembered it and never made the same mistake twice.”

They resolved to learn from Bardet and Pinot’s examples, limiting his media engagements outside of races, but also practising over and over when on altitude camps. He is an excellent speaker, with Decathlon wanting that personality to stand out — in modern cycling, especially one backed by a retail giant, he is a commercial asset as well as a rider — while affording him the recovery needed to win races.

This has been developed, to an extent; his former youth coaches describe Seixas as introverted, with his talent helping to generate the belief that he could lead a team, on and off the road.

In June, the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (the newly renamed Critérium du Dauphiné) served as a dress rehearsal for the media pressures of the Tour de France, with some 40 journalists attending a press conference and the team making him available to speak every morning in front of the bus. Next January, Bardet will also join the team in the newly created role of sporting manager, bringing his own experience of challenging for the yellow jersey.

Seixas’ physical abilities are well-known. His raw numbers, especially his powers of recovery, place him in an elite bracket of endurance athletes — a catchment that can be counted on one hand when considering his age. Already, however, it has become evident that he is a rider of rare maturity.

“He was 18 when I first got to know him, but he’s completely different, he’s already like a 25-year-old,” says Decathlon team-mate Aurélien Paret-Peintre. “He knows so clearly what he wants for the race, for his career. He has a really good plan.”

It was a trait, too, that Pogačar picked out when asked about Seixas in Liège: “I admire him. At such a young age, he’s so mature.”

Last year, when riding to what appeared to be his first professional victory at the Tour of the Alps, Seixas gave a stage victory away to team-mate Nicolas Prodhomme as an appreciation of the domestique duties he had received.

Decathlon’s coaching staff still laugh at Seixas’ reaction when that win finally came, having beaten João Almeida and Juan Ayuso at this year’s Volta ao Algarve Bicicleta. After celebrating for 15 seconds, Seixas turned, stopped, and his face fell.

“Damn, I left my recovery shoes on the bus,” he said, their coach several kilometres away at the bottom of the valley. “I won’t be able to recover the best I can.”

This Tour, he has scaled back the ultra-attacking style that saw him win the Itzulia Basque Country in April, riding a disciplined race knowing that he cannot launch alone against Pogacar, Jonas Vingegaard, and the remaining podium contenders.

After climbing to Le Lioran on Stage 10, that newfound canniness was on full display — this is the first level where he has not been the most physically gifted in the field.

“Many riders didn’t think about how to manage the climb — they went all out from the bottom,” he said post-stage, having finished third. “After that, we let Vingegaard ride, because he had the most to lose. He took us to the finish.“

Paret-Peintre has played a key role in that development, the 30-year-old climber becoming an unlikely long-term roommate for his young team leader, and relishing the mentorship role.

“I’ve known him since he arrived at the team,” Paret-Peintre tells The Athletic before the start of stage 13. “He already knows everything about the race. He’s super strong, so my role is more of an extra, mentally.

“After the stage, I tell him: ‘Bye, go quickly to the shower’, to recover as much as possible, for example. I also try to be a link between him and the team if he’s tired and wants fewer interviews; it’s about having less stress for him.”

Paret-Peintre has seen rapid development in his team-mate over the last two weeks; in his view, it is in keeping with Seixas’ trajectory since the pair met.

“In the last six months, he really developed his ability to manage a group, to be a really good leader”, said Paret-Peintre. “He said to me this winter: ‘I’m just 19, it’s hard to ask these guys, like Tiesj (Benoot), already 32 years old, to do these things’. But now he’s really clear in his head, he does not feel the pressure for the moment.”

The noise is growing by the day, especially as he sits on the edge of the podium for Saturday’s decisive climb of Le Markstein, followed by Plateau de Solaison a day later.

With national attention turned back towards the Tour, France having been knocked out of the World Cup in the semi-finals on Tuesday, there is a sense that a podium or stage win will send Seixas into true superstardom. Already, like Kylian, he is just “Paul”.

“Mbappe launched this generation — there’s (NBA star) Victor Wembanyama, (Olympic swimmer) Leon Marchand — who are able to be so charismatic at 18 or 19 years old, and who can say: ‘OK, no matter my age, I want to be the best’,” Herincx explains.

“Seixas is part of that, and that means he appeals to the younger generation, but there’s also something else. When he was announced as going to the Tour, there was a video of him visiting his grandparents in the countryside, the ones who got him into cycling, and I think everybody can identify with that. We all grew up with the Tour with our grandparents, so I think he manages to gather every generation.”

“J’ai quelque chose à vous annoncer…”

“I have something to tell you…”#DECATHLONCMACGMTEAM – @Decathlon @cmacgm @van_rysel pic.twitter.com/kcKzR4hBIo

— DECATHLON CMA CGM TEAM (@decathloncmacgm) May 4, 2026

Herincx is aware of the media’s own role, and especially L’Équipe, as the race’s dominant voice — the Tour was founded to sell copies of the newspaper’s predecessor L’Auto — in not putting unfair pressure on Seixas. He believes it is a fair point to raise.

“I think we set our line on the very first day it was announced he would go to the Tour,” Herincx answers. “We wrote an editorial, which effectively stated he had nothing to lose; that because he was only 19, we shouldn’t pretend he was going to win the Tour, to be as good as Pogačar or Vingegaard, but he could not be faulted for finishing off the podium, or exploding in the Tour’s third week. We’ve tried to be really careful, even when we focus on his success.”

So far, the demands on Seixas do not appear to be overwhelming; he sails serenely above them, at the least. That is not to say they do not exist, merely that Seixas is uniquely wired to carry them. One example stands out: competing in the French cyclocross title as a 15-year-old, riding one year up.

In the race, held in the northern mud of Pas-de-Calais, he was crashed into by a Breton rider on the very first lap. The impact injured his leg, before he crashed a few kilometres later, losing a shoe, before falling back from the leaders once again. He eventually hit the front on the final lap — winning the sprint to take victory. His response?

“I know I mustn’t put incredible pressure on myself before a championship, otherwise it becomes unmanageable,” he told local website DirectVelo. “At cadet level, nothing is at stake right now. I’m not risking my life.

“It’s in the higher categories that I’ll need to be at my best. For the moment, it’s just preparation for the future. It’s all about having fun — that’s what I have to tell myself before a French Championship. I know it’s possible. I let fate take its course.”

The level has changed, the risk is there, his attitude remains the same.