Seixas Still in Yellow on Queen Stage Eve: How Decathlon-AG2R Turned a Sixteen-Rider Break Into a Rest Day
On the eve of the Itzulia Basque Country queen stage through Galdakao, Paul Seixas sat in the back of a Decathlon-AG2R-La Mondiale team bus on the Basauri finish line and pulled a dry team t-shirt over his yellow jersey. He had just crossed the line 42 seconds behind the stage winner, deep inside the peloton, shielded by four teammates and — crucially — completely untroubled for six hours of racing. The 19-year-old Frenchman is halfway through the most improbable GC defence of the 2026 season, and he spent Wednesday doing almost none of the work.
That is the real story of stage 3. Axel Laurance's uphill sprint win over Igor Arrieta is the photograph that will lead the Thursday morning papers, and rightly so. But the tactical result of the day — the reason the Decathlon-AG2R squad board the bus looking calmer than any team should two days from a queen stage — is that their yellow jersey spent stage 3 essentially on a long training ride. Seixas did not take a single turn on the front of the peloton. He did not chase a single attack. He did not, by the post-race analytics, spend more than two minutes above 350 watts from kilometre zero to the base of the Basauri ramp. If you had spliced in footage of the final 400 metres with the stage comfortably under control behind, you could have convinced somebody the Frenchman had raced a criterium.
None of this happened by accident. The day's cleverest piece of sports direction came at 9:47 in the morning, in a team meeting at the Hotel Arrupe outside Bilbao, where head directeur sportif Stéphane Goubert laid out a simple instruction to his eight riders: let the breakaway go, let it be big, let it be made mostly of teams who had already lost time at Monday's time trial. The condition was that the move had to contain a UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider, which would force the blue team to contribute to the chase if the move began to threaten. Goubert had studied the stage profile overnight and concluded that the 25 kilometres from the top of Sarasola to the finish in Basauri were rolling enough to keep any break at a safe distance from the GC, provided the gap never crept above four minutes.
By the time the flag dropped on the neutral zone, the plan was already executing itself. A 16-rider move slipped clear inside thirty kilometres. It contained Laurance, Arrieta (the UAE insurance policy Goubert had asked for), Neilson Powless, Florian Vermeersch, Harold Tejada and Louis Meintjes — none of them within four minutes of the yellow jersey, all of them with enough profile to force the peloton to respect them. The maximum gap of 4:15 came at the top of Bikotx-Gane with 70 kilometres still to ride. Decathlon did not panic. They simply put one rider — the tireless Clément Champoussin — on the front of the peloton and held a steady pace that kept the gap within a controllable window for the final hour. By the time Laurance and Arrieta split the break on Sarasola with 25 kilometres to go, the gap was already back to 3:30 and falling.
The unspoken second beneficiary of the day was Primož Roglič. Second on GC at 2:14, the Slovenian and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe had every reason to attack — indeed, the rest day is over and there are only two GC days remaining — but Roglič has learned over fifteen years of stage racing that chasing a break on a day when the GC is otherwise sedate is the surest way to burn a teammate's legs for the day you actually need them. His team helped briefly in the final 20 kilometres, and then, when the breakaway gap refused to collapse fast enough, he shut down the effort and settled back into the bunch alongside Seixas. The look he gave the yellow jersey on the Etxebarri roundabout — half competitive, half grudgingly amused — said everything about where he believes this race is heading.
The one moment of genuine GC danger came in the final three kilometres, not from the break but from within the peloton. Juan Ayuso's UAE Team Emirates-XRG squad, still reeling from the morning abandon of Isaac del Toro and desperate to salvage anything from Wednesday, launched a pure GC attack with Tadej Majka pulling hard for two hundred metres before Ayuso himself jumped out of the group. Felix Gall closed the move with a single calm acceleration; Seixas did not even need to leave the Gall wheel. No splits. No time gaps. Nothing on the GC sheet to reflect any of it. UAE's day had already been written.
The overall standings at the end of stage 3 are now exactly the same as they were at the start: Seixas in yellow with a 2:14 advantage on Roglič, Gall third at 2:38, Ayuso fourth at 3:11, Sepp Kuss fifth at 3:29 and Ben O'Connor sixth at 3:42. Del Toro is gone. Mikel Landa, who was also projected to feature in the GC fight, is limping home in the grupetto after the race doctor's car crash on stage 2 that left him with a heavily bandaged elbow and the will to ride but not to race. The list of genuine threats to the 19-year-old Frenchman's lead has narrowed, and the list of his still-useful teammates has not.
"Today was about not having a day," Seixas smiled after the stage. He had already answered the obvious question — how do you defend a 2:14 lead without actually racing? — a dozen times by then. "We said in the meeting: the best stage is the one where nothing changes. Sixteen riders went up the road. None of them were close enough to touch the yellow jersey. So we managed. Clément pulled for an hour and I did nothing. That is a good stage for a yellow jersey." Goubert, arriving at the bus with a phone still glued to his ear, simply tapped his directeur sportif on the shoulder and said: "See you on the queen stage."
Thursday is the day this race gets decided. The final 50 kilometres through Galdakao contain four categorised climbs — Urkiola, San Antonio, Bikotxgane and a brutal uphill finish at the 12% ramps of Ugao — and there is nowhere for a rider who is not in peak form to hide. If Seixas survives that, nothing short of a crash can stop him taking the biggest WorldTour stage-race win of his life. If he doesn't, Roglič and Gall know exactly which Itzulia moments in which other years made them start to believe in themselves. "Tomorrow," Seixas said one last time before disappearing behind the bus door, "we will see who is tired. I know I am not tired yet."