Itzulia Queen Stage Tactical Blueprint: Inside Decathlon-AG2R's Plan to Defend Seixas' Lead on the Galdakao Mountains
When Paul Seixas rolls down the start ramp in Vitoria-Gasteiz on Thursday morning, the 19-year-old Decathlon-AG2R prodigy will be carrying the biggest GC lead of his short professional career — and facing by some distance the most dangerous stage he has ever defended. At 2 minutes 14 seconds over Primož Roglič and with five classification jerseys already in the wardrobe, Thursday's queen stage around Galdakao is the day the 2026 Itzulia Basque Country will either be locked away or torn open.
Speaking in Bilbao on Wednesday evening, Decathlon-AG2R directeur sportif Stéphane Goubert laid out a plan that is as cold-blooded as anything the French squad has produced in a decade. "We will race Thursday like we are a team that is two minutes behind, not two minutes ahead," Goubert said. "Aggression is safety. If we give the race to Red Bull-BORA and UAE to control, they will break it apart on their terms — and the first rider they break is ours."
The practical translation is a three-phase tactical structure that Goubert and head coach Frédéric Grappe have mapped out on the stage profile sector by sector. Phase one, from the Vitoria neutral zone to the foot of the opening category-two Otxandio climb at kilometre 48, is the simplest: seal off the break. Veterans Aurélien Paret-Peintre and Oliver Naesen will man the front, allowing only a designated "safe" break of non-threats to develop — nobody within six minutes of GC, nobody from Red Bull-BORA, and absolutely nobody from UAE Team Emirates-XRG.
Phase two is where the plan gets genuinely interesting. From the foot of the mid-stage Karabieta — the 8.3km second-category climb where last year's decisive move went clear — Felix Gall and Ben O'Connor will ride a tempo hard enough to shed domestiques from every rival squad. "We want to be in a scenario where at the bottom of the Legina we have Paul, Felix, Ben and two of them — Roglič and one or maybe two others. Nothing else," Goubert explained. "If Red Bull still has one mountain man on the decisive climb, we have failed the plan." Both Gall — himself a 2024 Tour de France stage winner on a summit finish — and O'Connor, the 2023 Giro podium finisher, are riding deep into reserves that would, on any normal week, be reserved for their own grand tour ambitions.
Phase three is the Legina itself: 4.9 km at 9.8% average gradient, cresting just 8.8 km from the finish. This is where Seixas will have to ride his own race. Goubert has been explicit that the team will not burn Gall or O'Connor to mark attacks on the Legina if Seixas is comfortable — the French teenager's VO2 numbers from the Bilbao opening time trial (an 89.2 ml/kg/min reading, the highest ever recorded by a Decathlon rider at the race) suggest he has the raw ceiling to handle any move Roglič or Isaac del Toro can throw at him. "The only thing we tell Paul is: do not chase for the stage," Goubert said. "The stage is not ours to win. The race is ours to not lose."
The headline variable is Roglič himself. The 36-year-old Slovenian has the most decorated Itzulia CV in the peloton — four-time overall winner, fourteen career stage victories — and his Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe squad are riding the queen stage with the singular mission of turning a two-minute deficit into a realistic final-day gap. Matteo Sobrero and Jai Hindley will soften the race from long range, sports director Enrico Poitschke has confirmed, with Roglič's decisive attack expected not on the Legina but on the preceding Unbe climb — a less iconic but steeper ascent where the Slovenian believes Decathlon's domestiques will have been emptied. "We have to race unexpectedly," Poitschke said on Tuesday. "Two minutes in one stage is not impossible — but only if we find the right 500 metres."
There is also the del Toro factor. The Mexican UAE leader sits fifth overall at 2:38 and has the legs, the team and the mandate to go all-in for the stage win on his own terms. A long-range del Toro move over the Unbe could force Decathlon-AG2R into a tactical bind — chase him and burn Gall; let him go and give UAE a platform from which to launch Adam Yates or Jay Vine later in the stage. Goubert did not rule out the possibility that the team would simply wave del Toro up the road. "If del Toro wants to take the stage and drop himself two minutes into the GC, we would honestly be delighted. The only man we care about is Roglič, because the only man with a mathematical path to yellow is Roglič."
Twenty-four hours before the hardest stage of his career, Paul Seixas looked disarmingly calm on the Decathlon-AG2R team bus in Vitoria. "I have the best team in the race riding for me," he said, "and I have tomorrow's stage on paper already in my hands. I know what the plan is. Now I just have to ride the bike." On Thursday afternoon, we will find out whether a French teenager with two weeks of WorldTour GC leadership can survive the most decorated stage racer of his generation on the biggest day of the biggest race of his life so far — and whether the most disciplined domestique unit of Decathlon-AG2R's history can keep him there when the mountains finally come.