Itzulia Stage 4 Galdakao Queen Stage Race-Day Briefing: Seven Climbs, A 1'59" Gap, And The Last Real Chance For A GC Upset
At 11:45 Spanish time on Thursday morning, the peloton rolled out of Galdakao for the 167.2km queen stage of the 2026 Itzulia Basque Country with the race already, in almost every meaningful sense, done. Paul Seixas is in yellow by 1 minute 59 seconds over Primož Roglič. He is in green. He is in the polka dots. He is in white. He is 19 years old, he has won two stages, and he has defended the leader's jersey on a 152.8km breakaway day without the Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale train doing more than routine tempo work. On Thursday, the race enters the last terrain on which any of that can realistically change.
The Galdakao-Galdakao loop is the most difficult stage of this year's Itzulia and, by most metrics, the toughest queen stage the race has offered since 2019. Seven categorised climbs, a total of 3,012 metres of vertical gain, and a finish that tips slightly uphill through the industrial outskirts of Galdakao to a line drawn in front of the Ibaigane bridge. The decisive feature is the penultimate climb, the first-category Elorritxueta ascent — 6.4 kilometres at 8.2% average with three 12% ramps in the final two — cresting a little over twenty kilometres from the finish.
For Decathlon-AG2R, the mathematics of Thursday are simpler than they have been at any point this week. Seixas does not need to win the stage. He does not even need to finish in the first group. He needs to lose less than 1 minute 59 seconds to Roglič and less than 2 minutes 47 seconds to Juan Ayuso, whose nightmare stage 2 has consigned the Lidl-Trek debutant to a lonely third overall. If Seixas can simply sit in Roglič's wheel from Elorritxueta to the line, he wins the 2026 Itzulia Basque Country. Everything inside the Decathlon bus on Wednesday night was about building the scenarios in which that is — or is not — possible.
The team DSs are split on which way the race is most likely to go. Head director Stéphane Goubert told French television on Wednesday evening that the real danger on a finish like Galdakao's is not a solo attack from Roglič but a co-ordinated move from Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe using Aleksandr Vlasov or Gianni Moscon as the early accelerator. "You never lose a Basque stage to one rider," Goubert said. "You lose it to a team."
For Roglič, Thursday is the last lever. The Slovenian has spent this week openly framing the Itzulia as an Ardennes bridge, with Red Bull performance director Patxi Vila stating on Tuesday that the objective was "to leave the Itzulia in the shape that wins Amstel." That is a message that tolerates losing overall to a teenager. It does not tolerate losing the stage as well. On a queen stage where Roglič has historically excelled — he has won three queen stages at this race in five attempts — anything less than an attack from distance would be out of character and, frankly, out of script.
Further down GC, the interest is on the Ineos-Movistar subplot. Cian Uijtdebroeks starts the day in tenth overall, having climbed into the top ten on Wednesday for the first time since his January radius fracture, and Carlos Rodríguez is twelfth at 5 minutes 22 seconds, looking to build on an Ineos Grenadiers spring revival that took its 16th win on Wednesday. Both will ride defensively in the morning and attack, if at all, only inside the final twenty kilometres.
The weather will not complicate matters. Partly cloudy, 14-16°C, a light westerly breeze of 8 kph — near-ideal racing conditions for the Basque Country in April. The overnight showers that had been forecast in the mountainous interior of Vizcaya on Wednesday evening cleared by 07:30, and the roads were reported dry at the Elorritxueta summit by the Decathlon recon car shortly before breakfast. For a race that has been punctuated all week by crashes — from the Landa medical-car expulsion to the Isaac del Toro stage 3 abandonment — the absence of a weather variable on the most dangerous descending stage of the race is the single largest piece of good news for the GC group.
The full Itzulia Basque Country resumes with a flatter stage 5 to Eibar on Friday and concludes with the traditional mountain time trial to Bergara on Saturday. But by the time the peloton re-enters Galdakao this evening after six-and-a-half hours on the road, it will, in all likelihood, be clear who is winning the 2026 edition. And barring the unimaginable, the answer will still be a 19-year-old Frenchman in his first full WorldTour season — a rider who, four days ago, had not yet won a professional bike race.