Seixas Completes the Hat-Trick: Third Itzulia Stage Win in Three Days With Solo Attack on Basauri Ramp
The Paul Seixas show at the Itzulia Basque Country just keeps escalating. Three days, three stages, three victories. The 19-year-old Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale sensation completed an extraordinary hat-trick on Wednesday afternoon, attacking out of a lead group on the final categorised climb of the day to ride away solo on the punchy 400-metre, 8.8% finishing ramp into Basauri. He took his third consecutive stage win and pushed his overall lead beyond two minutes — and the Basque Country race has now well and truly become his to lose.
The 152.8km loop south of Basauri included 2,824 metres of climbing across seven categorised ascents, and on paper it was billed as the "easiest" of the race's mountain days — a description that is going to need rewriting after what Seixas just did to the WorldTour's biggest GC names. After his Decathlon team controlled the breakaway throughout the afternoon, the young Frenchman needed only one acceleration to detonate the front of the race, dropping Primož Roglič, Isaac del Toro and Juan Ayuso with brutal ease before time-trialling to the finish.
"I didn't think I could win three in a row, honestly — I was just thinking about defending the jersey," Seixas said in the finish area, still wearing the leader's maillot amarillo. "But the team rode such a perfect race that when I attacked I felt like I had the legs, and on this kind of finish you have to commit. I am living a dream right now." It was a dream that, by the time the bonus seconds were added, had stretched his GC lead over Roglič to more than two minutes — an almost surreal margin given the calibre of riders chasing him.
For Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, Roglič did everything that could reasonably be asked of a 36-year-old defending against a phenomenon. He matched the elite group all day, refused to crack under repeated UAE attacks, and finished 14 seconds adrift of Seixas on the Basauri ramp — a result that on any other afternoon would have looked like a strong fightback. But against Seixas's relentlessness, even Roglič's discipline couldn't stop the haemorrhage. He sits second on GC at 2:01, with del Toro third at 2:33 and Ayuso still struggling deep into the top fifteen.
The most remarkable element of the day was the fact that UAE Team Emirates-XRG threw the kitchen sink at the Decathlon-AG2R squad and came away empty-handed. Del Toro launched two stinging accelerations on the penultimate climb, hoping either to soften Seixas or set up an ambush for himself, but Decathlon's Felix Gall calmly closed every gap, often pulling for several minutes at a time without changing his rhythm. "Felix was incredible today," Seixas said. "He's racing like a leader for me. That is something I will never forget."
Across town in the Itzulia race village, the conversation has shifted decisively. After two stages there were still whispers about whether the GC veterans could chip away at Seixas; after stage three those whispers have died. Ayuso, the defending champion, now sits more than four minutes adrift in fifteenth — a spectacular collapse for a rider who arrived in the Basque Country as one of the favourites. UAE's directeurs sportifs were already pivoting in their post-stage briefings to the queen stage around Galdakao on Thursday as the only remaining day big enough to overturn the race.
Even there, however, the maths are starting to look unforgiving. Seixas now leads the GC, the points classification, the mountains classification, the young riders' classification AND the combativity ranking — a virtual five-jersey clean sweep almost unheard of at WorldTour level outside of the rarest dominant rides. Decathlon-AG2R team manager Dominique Serieys called it "a moment we will all remember for the rest of our careers" and confirmed that the team will now ride entirely defensively for the remaining days, with no instructions to chase further bonus seconds.
For French cycling, this is the kind of performance that arrives once in a generation. Not since the early career heights of Laurent Fignon, Bernard Hinault and the great Decathlon-AG2R predecessors of the 1970s and 80s has a 19-year-old Frenchman so completely controlled a WorldTour stage race. With the Tour of the Alps starting in less than two weeks and the Tour de France on the distant summer horizon, the question is no longer whether Seixas is the real thing — it is how high the ceiling actually goes.