"He Did Not Need A Train, A Sprint, Or A Plan B — He Needed Nineteen Hundred Metres Of A 9.6% Wall" — Paul Seixas Becomes The Youngest Winner In La Flèche Wallonne History, Mauro Schmid And Ben Tulett Complete The Podium At Three Seconds
Wednesday 16:47 CET. On a warm, dry afternoon in Huy, Paul Seixas (Decathlon CMA CGM) rode away from the rest of the Flèche Wallonne peloton from the base of the Mur de Huy and did not look back. The 19-year-old Frenchman crossed the line three seconds ahead of Mauro Schmid (Jayco-AlUla) and Ben Tulett (Visma-Lease a Bike) to take his first one-day Classic, his second WorldTour victory of the 2026 spring, and a place in the record books as the youngest winner in the 90-year history of the race. The previous record-holder, Davide Rebellin at 20, had held the mark since 1996.
The day's winning move did not need a committee. Seixas took the Mur on the front from the 1.3km to go banner, shifted two cogs smaller with 900 metres remaining, and opened a gap on the chasers with the first serious acceleration at the 17% ramp. From there the margin only grew. Tulett, the 23-year-old Briton from Visma riding his first WorldTour Classic podium, tried to answer at 500 metres to go and was held at three bike lengths. Schmid, the Swiss national champion, came past Tulett in the final 100 metres to take second on the line. Behind, Romain Grégoire (Groupama-FDJ) crossed fourth and Mattias Skjelmose (Lidl-Trek) fifth, rounding out a top five that confirmed the Ardennes generational handover is already complete.
The win was constructed on a race that Decathlon had nothing to lose from controlling. With Tadej Pogačar not on the startlist — the Slovenian having confirmed his Ardennes programme as a Liège-only start — and Remco Evenepoel pulling out 48 hours earlier to protect his legs for Sunday, Seixas arrived in Ciney as the shortest-priced favourite on a Flèche Wallonne start sheet since 2019. The sign-on closed at 09:51 with Seixas wearing the Decathlon CMA CGM blue-and-white, and the odds board that had opened him at 5/4 on Monday evening contracted to 6/5 by the final team bus briefing at the Ciney start village. For a rider who had only won La Flèche Wallonne Espoirs in 2024, the hype was considerable. The response on the Mur was emphatic.
Seixas's race had a significant scare. On the Côte de Ereffe with 43 kilometres remaining, a crash in the middle of the peloton brought down seven riders and clipped Seixas's rear wheel. The Decathlon leader stayed upright but lost both his bottle and 30 seconds to the front group, requiring a 15-kilometre chase behind the team car before he returned to the main bunch. By the 20km board on the Côte de Cherave he was back in the top ten, and by the base of the Mur he was in third wheel behind Decathlon domestiques Clément Champoussin and Valentin Paret-Peintre. The tactical execution was textbook: Paret-Peintre led through the first 400 metres of the climb, Champoussin pulled through to the 900-metre banner, and Seixas launched from there. The acceleration registered on his SRM at 912 watts over 25 seconds — the kind of number that wins races in the Ardennes and gets flagged as the headline statistic of the week.
For Mauro Schmid, second place at 3 seconds was the result of a spring-long bet that did not quite come off. The Jayco-AlUla rider had finished fourth at Brabantse Pijl, fifth at Amstel Gold, and had opened the Flèche Wallonne morning board at 14/1 as the dark-horse pick for a rider who had always been better suited to the Mur than to the Cauberg. In the mixed zone, Schmid offered the afternoon's most honest quote: "I think today I rode my best race of the year, and I still finished three seconds behind a nineteen-year-old. That is cycling in 2026." For Ben Tulett, third at 3 seconds, the result was the first WorldTour Classic podium of a career that Visma have been patiently rebuilding since his 2022 illness-hit season — and a data point that will change Visma's Liège tactical hierarchy for Sunday.
The Liège-Bastogne-Liège subplot was the conversation in every team bus at 17:30. Seixas, asked by Sporza about his Sunday plans, gave the quote the French press will run on the Thursday morning back pages: "Today I proved I can win on the Mur. Sunday is a different kind of race, and Pogačar is on the start list. My job is to be in the front group with ten kilometres to go." Pogačar, who watched the Flèche Wallonne finish from a UAE Team Emirates-XRG debrief in Monaco, posted on his Strava within the hour a 34-minute openers ride with the caption "Big weekend ahead." The Liège showdown, already the spring's most-priced Monument on the books, now carries an added edge. The generational handover Seixas delivered on the Mur de Huy on Wednesday will meet its sternest test on the Côte de la Redoute on Sunday.
For Decathlon CMA CGM, the win is the team's second WorldTour one-day Classic of 2026 and the culmination of a spring plan that had quietly been built around Seixas's Ardennes debut since the December training camp in Calpe. The team had been explicit since January that the 19-year-old would not start Paris-Roubaix, would not contest Amstel Gold, and would arrive at the Flèche Wallonne as a fresh leader with the full Itzulia block in the legs. The bet paid. The rider France's press will now discuss until the Tour de France Grand Départ in Barcelona on July 4 is the rider who made Davide Rebellin a footnote on a Wednesday afternoon in April 2026.