Decathlon-AG2R's Itzulia Masterclass: Inside the Tactical Plan That Has Locked Down a Phenom's First WorldTour GC
For the better part of a decade, the team formerly known as AG2R La Mondiale has been a punchline in the WorldTour — a French squad with a faithful sponsor, an instantly recognisable orange-and-blue jersey, and a near-total inability to convert raw climbing talent into Grand Tour results. After the Decathlon takeover in late 2024, however, something has shifted. And this week at the Itzulia Basque Country, the new Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale has not just won races. It has dictated them, choked them, and made the WorldTour's biggest GC names look like they were riding a category lower.
The vehicle for this transformation is, of course, 19-year-old French phenomenon Paul Seixas, whose third stage win in three days on Wednesday afternoon was greeted in the Basque Country less with shock than with a kind of weary disbelief. But the more interesting story is not Seixas himself — it is the team riding around him. Because while the prodigy has been the one taking the bouquets, every meter of the race so far has been controlled by a Decathlon collective unit performing at a level the squad simply has not produced in years.
Start with the basic numbers. Across stages two and three, Decathlon-AG2R have ridden on the front of the peloton for a combined 168 kilometres — more than any other team at the race by a factor of two. The riders doing the work, in order of total turns at the front, are Felix Gall, Ben O'Connor, Aurélien Paret-Peintre, Clément Berthet, Bruno Armirail and Geoffrey Bouchard. That is the spine of the squad — and notably, two of those names (Gall and O'Connor) are themselves Grand Tour podium-level riders who have agreed to spend an entire week in service of a teammate ten years their junior.
"What is happening here is unprecedented in the history of this team," sports director Stéphane Goubert told L'Équipe on Wednesday evening. "We have two riders who could win this race themselves — Felix and Ben — and they are both riding flat-out for Paul without a moment of hesitation. That kind of buy-in from leaders is something money cannot buy. It is the result of a culture we have built over the last 18 months, and it is the foundation on which everything Decathlon are doing is being built." The numbers back him up: Gall pulled for over six minutes uninterrupted on the penultimate climb of stage three, refusing to let UAE's Isaac del Toro open a gap.
Tactically, the Decathlon plan has been simple but ruthlessly executed. On stage one's Bilbao time trial, Seixas was allowed full freedom to bury himself for the win. From stage two onwards, the entire team has ridden a defensive blockade — controlling the breakaway composition, refusing to let any GC threat escape, and softening every climb until Seixas could attack from a small front group of seven or eight riders. On stages two and three, they have allowed only one rider with a sub-five-minute deficit into the day's break, and have ridden the peloton at a pace fast enough to neutralise UAE's attacking ambitions.
The contrast with UAE Team Emirates-XRG could hardly be starker. The Emirati squad came into Itzulia with a stacked team built around defending champion Juan Ayuso and dual-leader Isaac del Toro, and yet have been comprehensively outridden tactically by a team that on paper should not be capable of matching them. Ayuso has slipped to fifteenth on GC, more than four minutes adrift, and Del Toro — despite some stinging accelerations on stage three — has been unable to crack a Decathlon front that has refused to break under pressure.
For Decathlon, the implications stretch well beyond this week. The team has deliberately held off announcing a Grand Tour leader for 2026, with both Gall and O'Connor previously expected to lead at the Giro or Tour. After this week, however, the conversation has shifted decisively. Multiple sources within the team confirmed to Cycling Lookout on Wednesday that internal discussions have already begun about the possibility of building a co-leadership Grand Tour around Seixas himself — a once-unthinkable scenario for a 19-year-old in his first full WorldTour season.
What we are watching this week, in other words, is not just the breakthrough of an exceptional young rider. It is the rebirth of an entire team. Decathlon's investment, coupled with Goubert's quietly ruthless tactical eye and the willingness of senior riders like Gall and O'Connor to sacrifice their own ambitions, has produced something the French peloton has not seen since the heyday of Groupama-FDJ's late-2010s renaissance: a French team riding like winners. With the queen stage on Thursday still to come and the prodigy's GC lead now beyond two minutes, there is every chance the next 48 hours produce the first French overall WorldTour stage race winner in over a decade — and Decathlon will deserve every column inch of it.