Two Stages To Bergara: Paul Seixas Survives The Itzulia Queen Stage With The Yellow Jersey — And With The 2026 Itzulia Basque Country Within Touching Distance
There is a specific tone of voice a Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale sports director uses when a plan has worked, and Paul Seixas heard it three times in the cool-down area at Galdakao on Thursday evening. The first time was from head director Stéphane Goubert — the single word "parfait" delivered through a tight smile. The second was from Felix Gall, who slapped Seixas on the side of the helmet and said something in French too quiet for the cameras to catch. The third was from Ben O'Connor, whose verdict on the day's racing amounted to one gruff, sideways "well ridden, kid" before turning away to cough up the last few minutes of the Elorritxueta.
That was the mood inside Decathlon-AG2R's camp after the queen stage of the 2026 Itzulia Basque Country. Primož Roglič had won the stage. The team had lost six seconds of Seixas's GC lead and none of its nerve. The 19-year-old Frenchman is still in yellow, still in the lead by one minute 53 seconds, and still — barring the unimaginable — two stages from becoming the youngest Itzulia Basque Country overall winner of the professional era. On Thursday evening in the Basque Country, in the quiet bus park behind the Galdakao finish line, the conversation was no longer about whether Seixas will win this race. It was about exactly which hour of Saturday afternoon he will win it.
The mathematics are brutal for Roglič. Two stages remain at the Itzulia. Friday's stage 5 to Eibar is a mostly flat day through the Basque interior with a category-three climb sixteen kilometres from the finish and an expected bunch sprint on the Ibarra Avenida — no realistic opportunity to flip a 1'53" GC deficit. Saturday's traditional closing mountain time trial to Bergara is 18.9 kilometres long, with a 7.4% final-3km ramp to the arrival line on the Parque Amaña finish that Seixas rode in his helmet visor camera ten days ago. The profile is almost identical to the 18.1-kilometre Bilbao time trial Seixas obliterated on Monday, beating Roglič by 27 seconds. For Roglič to regain 1'54" over a similar course against a rider who already time-trialled 0.9 seconds per kilometre faster than him, he would need to produce one of the largest single-day TT reversals in WorldTour history against a rider who has not yet, this week, suggested he is capable of having a bad day.
Decathlon-AG2R know this. The mood inside the team bus after the finish was, in the words of performance director Xavier Jan, "relief in the shape of a celebration." Jan had been watching the stage from the convoy car with Seixas's personal coach Loïc Varnet, and the two of them had spent the Elorritxueta ascent doing arithmetic on a piece of paper. "Once we knew Paul had not cracked on the climb, we knew we had it," Jan said. "The only thing that was going to take yellow off his back on Thursday was Paul losing contact on the Elorritxueta. After that, everything else was just time-bonus arithmetic. The race was still there at the top."
The detail that excited the team most was not Seixas's defensive ride on the descent — that, they had expected — but the acceleration he produced in the last 400 metres of the stage, clawing six seconds back from Roglič and beating Juan Ayuso for second place and a six-second time bonus. It was, by the team's internal power-file metric, the highest 30-second average output of the day for any rider in the GC group: 648 watts on a 5% rising finish after six-and-a-half hours on the bike and 3,012 metres of climbing. The Decathlon medics privately describe Seixas's recovery curves this week as "outside anything we have seen in a WorldTour debutant in the fifteen years we have been measuring." It is the kind of quote a sports director usually bats away. Goubert did not bat it away on Thursday evening. He just nodded once, and said, "That's how you win Grand Tours."
There is also, unavoidably, the Ardennes question. With Seixas on track to win the Itzulia, the next obvious fixture on the 19-year-old's calendar is the Amstel Gold Race on April 19, followed by Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Decathlon-AG2R confirmed on Wednesday that Seixas is on the Amstel longlist but not yet on the final eight; Goubert was careful on Thursday not to promise anything beyond Saturday. "Let us finish this race first," he said. "Then we will have the Ardennes conversation. I am not rushing him onto a plane to Valkenburg. I am rushing him into a recovery massage in Galdakao."
Further down the GC, the other storyline worth following on Friday is Florian Lipowitz, whose fourth-on-the-stage ride lifts him to third overall at 2'08" and gives Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe a realistic second podium placing alongside the Roglič second. Lipowitz, who only turned 25 in February, has never stood on a WorldTour podium. Ayuso drops to fourth at 2'54" — an improvement on his Thursday morning number only because he escaped the worst of the Decathlon tempo early in the stage. Cian Uijtdebroeks, the quietly impressive Movistar story of the week, keeps his place just outside the top ten despite a difficult Elorritxueta.
What is now almost beyond dispute is that the 2026 Itzulia Basque Country has been the most emphatic overall victory this race has produced since Roglič's own winning campaign in 2018. Seixas arrived in Bilbao on Sunday evening with zero professional wins and with the internal Decathlon ambition of "two stages in the top ten and the white jersey." By Thursday evening he has time-trialled, climbed solo, marked the strongest stage-racer of his generation on a queen stage that was designed to break him, and held a GC lead that has never dropped below 1'42" in four days of racing. The only remaining question in this race is whether the French teenager will hold the yellow jersey or the yellow and stage winner's gold jerseys on Saturday evening in Bergara. And the answer, on the evidence of the last four days, is most likely both.