Itzulia Stage 6 Bergara TT Race-Day Briefing: Seixas Wakes In Yellow For The Fifth Morning, The Chrono That Decides The Youngest Itzulia Winner Of The Professional Era
Saturday morning race-day briefing from Bergara. The 19-year-old Paul Seixas woke in the Decathlon-AG2R-La Mondiale team hotel at 07:30 for the fifth consecutive morning of this week's Itzulia Basque Country, took a 45-minute easy warm-up on the team's Rolls-Royce Wahoo Kickr setup in the hotel's conference room at 08:15, and at 09:20 sat down for breakfast in the team dining room next to DS Stéphane Goubert. The conversation between them lasted four minutes. It concerned one number. Paul Seixas needs to finish within one minute and thirty-seven seconds of Primož Roglič across today's 17.8-kilometre Bergara time trial to become, at 19 years and 301 days old, the youngest overall winner of the Itzulia Basque Country in the professional era — a record that has stood since Marino Lejarreta took his first Basque Country victory at 22 years and 178 days old in 1979.
The time trial itself is built for this kind of final exam. 17.8 kilometres from the start ramp outside the Bergara town hall through the industrial-park flat opening five kilometres, a gently rising 3.5-kilometre middle section following the Deba river valley east of Elgeta, a 2.1-kilometre flat through Antzuola, and a final 4.8-kilometre flat run-in back into the Bergara finishing straight in front of the Plaza San Martín. Total elevation gain: 88 vertical metres. Average gradient of the rising middle section: 1.4%. Forecast: 14°C at the first start ramp at 14:00 rising to 17°C at the final starter's slot of 16:38, a 7 km/h south-south-east tailwind across the river valley and a 9 km/h crosswind across the industrial park opening kilometres. It is, in the words of the Itzulia technical delegate handing the final weather sheet to the teams at the 09:00 DS briefing, "a dead-flat, fair, fast time trial and there is nothing anyone can do to rescue or lose a race in which they are not already prepared."
Goubert's race-day briefing to the Decathlon squad started at 10:15 in the team bus parked outside the Bergara start area and lasted six minutes. Seixas sat at the back and did not speak once. "We have been preparing for this time trial since the Monday of Paris-Nice," the French DS told the room. "The number is 1'37". Paul knows the number, I know the number, Vincent [Meunier, the team's time-trial coach] knows the number, and the only thing that matters between now and 16:38 is that we keep our heads empty of anything that is not Paul getting to that number." He then turned to the other seven Decathlon riders in the bus and asked each of them, one by one, to confirm that they were ready for their own time trials. "We have six other riders on the start sheet today," Goubert said. "Every one of you is riding for yourself and for the team. Then, at 16:38, we all stand at the start ramp."
Roglič — who rolls out of the start house at 16:36, two minutes ahead of Seixas as the current second on GC — held his own race-day briefing inside the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe bus at 09:45. DS Patxi Vila has been clear all week about the team's priorities: "We did not come here to win the Itzulia. We came here to leave the Itzulia in the shape that wins Amstel." The number Vila gave Roglič on Saturday morning, according to two sources inside the team, is that a full-commitment chrono ride capable of taking 1'38" out of Seixas would, in their assessment, take a full 12-14 days to recover from — and the team's entire reason for being at Itzulia Basque Country has been to avoid exactly that physiological cost ahead of Amstel Gold Race eight days away. Roglič himself is understood to have set himself the quiet internal goal of finishing within twenty seconds of the stage winner — an achievable 52-kph average across the 17.8-kilometre course — and then stepping off the bike with eight days of Ardennes preparation in the legs, not seven.
The stage-win conversation, with the overall essentially sealed, turns on a four-rider list. Filippo Ganna is the pre-stage favourite after his Dwars door Vlaanderen attack-from-distance performance and the fact that the Bergara course profile — long flat sections, low total elevation, modest rolling middle — is the single closest profile on the WorldTour calendar to the Poland 2024 Worlds time trial he won by 52 seconds. Josh Tarling, still the youngest elite male time-trial world champion on the circuit, starts at 16:34 and should go off hot. Brandon McNulty — fresh off signing a four-year UAE contract extension through 2030 and riding the Itzulia as his only altitude-camp bridge before a six-week Giro d'Italia altitude window — is the darkest of the dark horses, starting at 16:20 and the only rider in the final hour with a genuine specialist TT bike setup. Rémi Cavagna, riding his final season with Movistar before his announced move to Q36.5 for 2027, starts at 16:28 and has trained specifically on the Bergara finishing straight twice in the last ten days.
The quiet story of the morning is Juan Ayuso, who took the news of Isaac del Toro's confirmed thigh muscle tear on Thursday evening and rode a stage five on Friday that finally showed the form the peloton had been waiting to see from him all week. The Spaniard's Saturday morning ride has been watched carefully by every team performance manager in Bergara, not because the stage matters to his GC but because his time trial performance today is the single cleanest data point the entire peloton will have on Ayuso's readiness for Amstel Gold Race in eight days. UAE Team Emirates-XRG — suddenly the team under the most pressure to produce an Ardennes leader after Del Toro's MRI report hit on Wednesday night — need Ayuso to deliver a top-ten chrono today. The Spaniard himself, when asked by Mundo Deportivo at the start area at 10:40, said only: "Amstel starts today. I know what the team needs and I am going to ride for it."
Itzulia's race-day broadcast window opens at 14:00 with the first wave of riders and closes at 17:10 with the podium ceremony. The full Itzulia on-the-road coverage is carried on Eurosport in the UK, Eurosport Player in the Netherlands and Belgium, and for the first time on free-to-air Televisión Española in Spain — the return of Basque Country coverage to mainstream Spanish television after a three-year paywall window that the regional federations lobbied hard to close. The Decathlon-AG2R-La Mondiale team bus will stay parked outside the Bergara start house until Seixas rolls down the ramp at 16:38, at which point the entire seven-rider squad will move across to the Plaza San Martín finishing straight to wait for the final time. The team's entire post-race dinner has been booked at a Basque steak house called Casa Goyo on the Barrenkale since Wednesday morning on the hope that it might be a dinner worth celebrating.
In four hours and thirteen minutes, Paul Seixas will swing his right leg over a time-trial bike and ride out of the Bergara start house into the final exam of his first WorldTour stage-race overall victory. The number is 1'37". The weather is good, the course is honest, the legs are there. Decathlon-AG2R-La Mondiale will either win their first Itzulia in the team's ten-year history today or they will not, and the 19-year-old Frenchman will either stand on the Bergara podium at 17:00 holding the biggest trophy of his career or he will walk off the stage and start a nineteen-day countdown to Paris-Nice on the weight of what might have been. Everything, as Stéphane Goubert kept saying all week in the Basque Country evenings, is in the legs.