Itzulia Stage 5 Eibar: Paul Seixas Survives The Izua, One Time Trial From The Biggest Yellow Jersey Of The 2026 Spring
The 162-kilometre Donostia-San Sebastián to Eibar stage of the 2026 Itzulia Basque Country was supposed to be Primož Roglič's last real chance to rip the yellow jersey off the back of the youngest overall leader the race has had in fifty years. It did not work. Paul Seixas rode the final Basque mountain day the way every cycling journalist who has watched him this week expected: calmly, cleverly, and with the Decathlon-AG2R team riding a textbook defensive stage around him. The 19-year-old crossed the finish line in Eibar in the group of favourites, conceded fifteen seconds in bonus time on the final Izua climb, and now heads into Saturday's 17.8-kilometre Bergara individual time trial with a 1'38" cushion over the second-placed Primož Roglič and a WorldTour overall title that everyone in the peloton considers the Frenchman's to lose.
The stage itself was won by Bahrain Victorious's Matej Mohorič, who attacked alone from a six-rider breakaway on the cat-1 Krabelin (5km at 9.6%) with 62 kilometres still to race and soloed the rest of the way in. The Slovenian — deliberately off the Bahrain Victorious Paris-Roubaix seven this weekend so that he could ride a stage race in the legs for the Ardennes — took the second WorldTour win of a quiet 2026 season and his third career Itzulia stage. "This is the shape I wanted to take to Amstel and Liège," Mohorič said at the line. "The Itzulia is always the race that tells me whether I have the legs for the Ardennes. Today it told me I do." The break had gone on the very first climb of the day, containing Mohorič, Ineos's Axel Laurance (the stage 3 winner), Soudal-QuickStep's Louis Vervaeke, Lidl-Trek's Bauke Mollema on his farewell season, Cofidis's Benjamin Thomas and the Spanish climber Jesús Herrada of Burgos BH. Nobody behind had any appetite to chase once Decathlon-AG2R signalled from the front of the peloton that a breakaway win was exactly the outcome they wanted.
Behind Mohorič the entire GC fight compressed into the last ten kilometres of the cat-1 Izua (4.1km at 9.25%), summiting just 26.9km from the line. Roglič attacked three times — at the base, at the 2km-to-go sign on the climb, and one final dig 400 metres from the top — and took fifteen seconds in time bonuses across the stage on Seixas but did not take a single second of real time on him on the road. Juan Ayuso, who arrived at the Izua carrying Thursday's reputational damage from the Elorritxueta descent, held the front group all the way to the summit and then actively marked Roglič for the rest of the stage — a quiet but unmistakable signal from UAE Team Emirates-XRG that they want to arrive at Saturday's time trial with their GC reset in a position from which Ayuso and not Pogačar leads their Ardennes campaign.
Decathlon-AG2R's defence was a clinic. DS Stéphane Goubert opted to sacrifice Felix Gall first on the Krabelin, then Ben O'Connor on the Izua base, and left Seixas with one domestique — Spanish climber Clément Berthet — all the way to the summit. "I have not enjoyed a stage race this much since I rode Vuelta with Oscar Pereiro," Goubert said afterwards. "We arrived at the Izua with everything we needed and zero surprise. When you are defending a yellow jersey from Primož Roglič, that is the maximum a sports director can ask for." Seixas himself — visibly tired at the post-stage interview — kept his answers short. "Tomorrow is my race. I win Bergara time trials in training every Sunday. I know what I have to do. I will sleep tonight."
The TT arithmetic is brutal for Roglič and comforting for Seixas. The 17.8-kilometre Bergara time trial on Saturday is a mostly flat parcours with a 2.1km opening ramp, a middle section along the Deba valley, and a technical closing 600 metres into Bergara town centre. Seixas won the Bilbao opening time trial of this race by 18 seconds over Roglič across 11 kilometres. Pro-rated across 17.8 kilometres, that is roughly a 29-second expected margin in the Frenchman's favour before any fatigue or pressure effects are layered on top. Roglič would need to find 1'38" in the opposite direction — a 2'07" swing on 17.8km — just to go level. It has never happened in the professional era of Itzulia time trials. "Nobody in this peloton believes Paul is going to lose the race tomorrow," Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe DS Patxi Vila conceded at the finish. "Our race is whether we can finish second. And whether we can leave the Itzulia in the shape we need for Amstel Gold Race."
The broader significance of the day should not be lost in the arithmetic. Paul Seixas is now twenty-four hours from becoming the youngest rider in the fifty-year modern history of the Itzulia Basque Country to win it overall. The previous youngest winners — Joseba Beloki in 1999 at 22, Jonathan Castroviejo in 2013 at 25 — never looked as composed in yellow on queen stage day as the 19-year-old from Décines-Charpieu has looked this week. Decathlon-AG2R built this squad around Seixas in December and openly told their title sponsor they expected him to win a WorldTour stage race in 2026. They did not expect him to win the one with Roglič, Ayuso and Del Toro all on the startlist. "Paul is not the rider we thought we had in January," Goubert said, shaking his head. "He is the rider we will have for the next fifteen years."
Behind the top two, the Itzulia GC is settling into its final shape. Mikel Landa's absence after his Thursday evening clean MRI has handed third overall to Movistar's Cian Uijtdebroeks, who produced his best climbing performance in fourteen months on the Izua and climbs to 3'32" off yellow. Ineos's Carlos Rodríguez rounds out the provisional podium at 4'16". The biggest Friday mover was Lidl-Trek's Mattias Skjelmose, who quietly climbed from ninth to fifth and is now openly targeting a GC podium finish as a stepping stone to his Amstel Gold Race title defence.
The race restarts at 11:00 on Saturday morning in Bergara. The final stage is an individual time trial that every rider in the peloton — including the man in second overall — now assumes will confirm the outcome Decathlon-AG2R have been methodically engineering since the Monday time trial in Bilbao. "One more sleep," Seixas said, and smiled for the first time all week. "Then I am going to ride a time trial, and then I am going to think about the Tour de France for the rest of my life."