Paul Seixas was the subject of much of the noise ahead of this Tour de France, and the 19-year-old rising star still attracts some of the loudest cheers at the sign-on podium each morning, but on the road he has been relatively quiet.
This is the rider who went after Tadej Pogačar at Strade Bianche and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, who ran away with Itzulia Basque Country in a haze of long-range attacks, and who produced one of the most memorable days of the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes with his outrageous comeback from a high-speed crash.
In his short career so far, Seixas has shown himself to be a force of nature and a bundle of energy, but, despite all the hype around the Decathlon CMA CGM rider’s Tour debut, he has taken a more conservative approach to the race so far, as his team director Luke Rowe explained in a joint interview with Cyclingnews, The Guardian, and Het Laatste Nieuws.
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“You know, this guy has so much panache, charisma, passion, flamboyancy… all these words that he has so much of. So it’s not that you want to squash that, but also if you’re racing GC, a lot of days it’s just about getting from A to B, being patient and conservative, which some may view as boring, but that’s what it takes to ride the GC and that’s what it takes to be on the podium in the Tour de France.
“A lot of it is the make-up of the route of the Tour. You can lose the Tour in the Pyrenees, and in the Massif Central things can also go wrong. There are a lot of banana skin stages there, but you win or lose the Tour in the Alps. If you look at how brutal the last few days are, and you look at stage 20 where everything can get turned on its head, you do have to be quite conservative.”
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Rowe was keen to point out that Seixas hasn’t exactly been anonymous, but there has certainly been an emphasis on dialing things back for the rider who now sits in sixth place overall, with a 4:35 deficit to Pogačar.
“It’s not like he’s done nothing. He was third over the top of the Tourmalet, there was only Vingegaard and Pogačar in front of him and he pushed all the way to the top to limit the gap and he also gapped Remco and the others,” Rowe said.
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“So it’s not that we’re doing nothing, but you just have to be realistic in the way you race.”
While Seixas may have exercised a degree of restraint whenever the road has tilted uphill, the same is also true when the road has gone downhill. Seixas’ Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes crash was, of course, the result of what the rider himself described as ‘idiotic’ risk-taking on a descent, a habit he’d taken up as a way to easily gain positions in the peloton.
Paul Seixas (Decathlon CMA CGM) descending during a team training session before the Tour de France, still showing the signs of the earlier crash (Image credit: Getty Images)
Rowe says that he had to tell Seixas to ‘tone it down’ and reveals he actually imparted that message before Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, formerly called the Dauphiné.
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“It might sound like I’m bashing him a bit here, but he’s a 19-year-old kid and he’s descending very fast the first half of the year, and I spoke to him pre-Dauphiné and I said ‘we’ve just got to kind of tone that down a bit. With 3,500 kilometres in the Tour, if you take every corner full gas, one of them is going to catch you out.
“Unfortunately, you know, one did catch him out in the Dauphiné and it was a learning curve. You see at this Tour de France he is a little bit more cautious. He can descend with the best. He’s a fantastic bike handler, he’s got this tool, this weapon in his arsenal, but there’s a time to use it and there’s a time not to use it. With maturity, with age, I think you realise when to really send it and when to relax.”
The Tour de France now enters a new phase where it’s almost all-out GC racing, starting with a mountainous double-header this weekend, where Saturday’s tough journey through the Vosges is followed by a vicious summit finish in the Alps on Sunday.
With Tadej Pogačar such a runaway leader, Seixas finds himself in the thick of the podium battle and in the thick of uncharted waters as he races beyond a week for the first time.
Asked if he had the impression that everyone else was racing for second place, Rowe said: “Yeah, I have the same impression. But that’s not strange, because how many times have we seen a guy try to follow Pogačar, explode, and lose so much?
“You have to race smart. If you say to Paul, ‘when Pogačar goes, you follow’, I don’t think right here, right now he can follow Pogačar. Then he explodes and you lose more time. It’s ABC, it’s not rocket science but I don’t want to set him up to fail. I don’t want to put too much pressure on his shoulders.
“At the end of the day, he makes the decisions on the road. We try and guide him before the race and guide him on the radio. He also has to feel this and maybe there will be a day in this Tour, or in the years to come, where he can follow Pogačar. But right now, you fly too close to the sun, you get burned.”
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