French cycling has a new star. Paul Seixas, a 19-year-old from Lyon riding for Decathlon CMA CGM, clinched the overall title at the Tour of the Basque Country — known in Basque as the Itzulia — on Saturday in Bergara, northern Spain, becoming the first French rider to win a top-level WorldTour stage race since Christophe Moreau triumphed at the Critérium du Dauphiné in 2007. The final stage, a rain-soaked 136-kilometre ride from Goizper-Antzuola to Bergara across six categorised climbs, was won by American Andrew August (Ineos Grenadiers), with Seixas finishing comfortably enough to seal the general classification by two minutes and thirty seconds over Germany's Florian Lipowitz (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) and Norway's Tobias Halland Johannessen (Uno-X Mobility).
Seixas dominated the week with characteristic flair, winning three of the six stages including the opening time trial — a discipline in which he became France's first junior world champion in 2024. When Lipowitz launched an attack with around 55 kilometres to go on the final stage, Seixas responded sharply, briefly dropping his German rival before being caught ahead of the last major climb. He then controlled proceedings calmly, crossing the finish line alongside Lipowitz, over four minutes behind stage winner August, who had burst clear from the breakaway group on the final ascent of the Asentzio. Dutch rider Frank van den Broek (Picnic PostNL) finished third on the stage, while Johannessen's eighth place was enough to bump Slovenia's Primož Roglič off the overall podium.
The scale of the achievement is difficult to overstate. Seixas is now the youngest rider ever to win the Tour of the Basque Country outright, surpassing Laurent Jalabert, the last Frenchman to do so in 1999. He also breaks a record previously held by Tadej Pogačar — the Slovenian superstar who won the Tour of California at age 20 in 2019 — as the youngest winner of any WorldTour stage race. All of this has come within just fourteen months of his professional debut, and with a style that draws inevitable comparisons: attacking on descents, animated and unpredictable on the bike, seemingly allergic to conservatism. "We haven't seen anything like this in France for 50 years. It is simply exceptional," said Christian Prudhomme, director of the Tour de France.
For French cycling, a sport still haunted by the absence of a Tour de France winner since Bernard Hinault in 1985, Seixas represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity. He possesses the rare combination that Grand Tour contenders require: elite climbing ability and a powerful time trial engine. Yet his team and observers are careful not to rush him. The question of whether he will ride the Tour de France this July is expected to be decided after his appearances at the Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège later this month — the latter likely to feature a duel with Pogačar that has already captured the cycling world's imagination.
Beyond the records and the statistics, the week in the Basque Country offered a vivid portrait of a young man utterly at ease with pressure. Fluent in front of cameras in both French and English, comfortable as a team leader despite his age, Seixas appears to carry the weight of expectation lightly — burning through stages with what one observer called the joyful recklessness of a child dancing in the rain. Whether he lines up at the Tour de France or not, cycling has found its next great story.