Itzulia Stage 5 Eibar Race-Day Briefing: Paul Seixas Wakes Up In Yellow For The Fourth Morning Running And The Peloton Signs On With The Krabelin-Izua One-Two Staring Back At Them From The Profile
Friday dawn in Donostia-San Sebastián came up grey and 11°C with a fresh onshore breeze off La Concha beach, and for the fourth morning in a row Paul Seixas signed on wearing the Itzulia Basque Country yellow jersey. The 19-year-old Decathlon-CMA CGM leader takes a 1'53" GC cushion into stage 5 — the last mountain day of the 2026 race — and by the 08:30 team briefings in the Kursaal basement the entire sport knew what the shape of the day was going to look like. One hundred and sixty-two kilometres from Donostia to Eibar, eight categorised climbs, 3,000 metres of climbing, and the two climbs that have been circled in red marker on every DS's road book since Sunday: the first-category Krabelin at 100km and the first-category Izua with its summit 26.9km from the finish line.
The briefing inside the Decathlon-CMA CGM bus was, according to two sources inside the room, the shortest of the week. Head DS Stéphane Goubert walked the team through the stage profile, paused on the Izua, and said only: "Everyone knows what this climb is. We ride it like yesterday was the hard day. Today is a race that we protect." Goubert then spent the remaining 12 minutes of the briefing on the 26.9km descent-and-valley section between the Izua summit and the Eibar line — the part of the stage that is not in the headlines but is, in Goubert's view, where Seixas's yellow jersey is most realistically lost. "Two kilometres a minute on the wrong descent. That is how you lose 1'53"."
Eight kilometres further along the Donostia promenade, inside the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe bus, the briefing was longer and the framing was different. Primož Roglič — winner of yesterday's Galdakao queen stage and currently sitting second on GC at 1'53" — confirmed to his teammates that the team will ride stage 5 the same way it rode stage 4: with patience until the Krabelin, a single attack on the Izua, and no chase if the first attack does not stick. DS Patxi Vila to the room, according to a source present: "We said yesterday our week is a taper for Amstel. That does not change because we won. Primož is strong enough to try once. If it does not open the race we let Seixas have it and we leave the Basque Country on Saturday with the legs we need on the Cauberg in nine days." The Ardennes bridge framing that Vila has been using all week has now survived an actual queen-stage win.
The two other GC contenders with a realistic top-five to defend are Juan Ayuso (UAE Team Emirates-XRG, third at 2'31") and Mattias Skjelmose (Lidl-Trek, fourth at 2'54"). Ayuso, still publicly smarting from the Elorritxueta-descent drop that stripped 1'08" out of his week on Thursday, told Basque radio Euskadi Irratia at the sign-on: "I am going to ride stage 5 for myself. I am not going to sit on Seixas's wheel and wait for Roglič to attack me again. If there is a move to make on the Krabelin today, I will be the one making it." It is the first time Ayuso has publicly said he will attack before the final climb this week.
The weather is going to play a secondary but real role. Basque Country meteorological service Euskalmet is forecasting a single 40% rain shower window across the Krabelin summit between 14:20 and 15:10, with the rest of the stage dry and 14-16°C. That single wet window — if it arrives — lands precisely on the critical selection point of the day and is the reason Decathlon-CMA CGM's three-man descent support unit (Felix Gall, Aurélien Paret-Peintre and Bastien Tronchon) will ride the full length of the Krabelin descent tucked inside Seixas's rear wheel. "If it rains on the Krabelin summit, the descent is the whole race, not the Izua," Goubert said in the Thursday-evening team briefing. "If the descent is dry, it is still the whole race. That is the kind of day it is."
The stage rolls out from the Donostia Kursaal at 12:20 local time with the neutral zone running 4.2km along the Paseo Nuevo before the kilometre-zero flag drops at the foot of the Jaizkibel access road. The breakaway is expected to form inside the first 15km on the rolling approach to Tolosa and the GC contenders are not expected to touch each other until the foot of the Krabelin at the 91km mark. The stage finishes in Eibar with a technical 2.1km run-in through the old town and a 400-metre finishing straight on Avenida Otaola that narrows to 6.5 metres in the final 150. One final note from the Decathlon bus this morning, delivered as Seixas clipped in for a short pre-stage spin along the promenade: "One more mountain day. Then a time trial. Then history." The quote was Goubert's. The face on the 19-year-old yellow jersey as he rode past the race motos was completely unreadable.
Saturday's final-day time trial is 18.2km around Bergara and rises 140m in the last 5.4km — a parcours that moderately favours Roglič over Seixas on paper but not by the 1'53" it would take to move the jersey. If Seixas survives Friday's last mountain day with his deficit on stage 5 inside 30 seconds, the 2026 Itzulia Basque Country is his. If he loses a minute on the Izua or on the technical Eibar run-in, Friday afternoon will be where the youngest Itzulia overall winner of the professional era stopped being a sentence we were writing and became a sentence about a 19-year-old who ran out of mountains two days too early. The peloton signs on at 12:00. The flag drops at 12:20. The answer comes at roughly 16:45.