"He has the whole package": Paul Seixas prepares to rewrite Tour de France history at just 19

French cycling has been searching for its next true superstar for decades, but 19-year-old Paul Seixas looks like the real deal. After a jaw-dropping spring that saw him dominate the Tour of the Basque Country, win La Flèche Wallonne, and go toe-to-toe with Tadej Pogacar at Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the teenage prodigy is currently at an altitude training camp in the Sierra Nevada, where he is gearing up to become the youngest Tour de France starter since 1937.

Seixas didn't take the typical path of a modern prodigy by living like a strict professional from the age of 14. Instead, his rapid rise through the junior ranks to Decathlon's WorldTour squad has happened naturally, leaving him with an immense amount of untapped potential.

Stephen Barrett, Head of Performance at Decathlon, has watched the young Frenchman hit milestone after milestone over the last few seasons.

“We’ve known about him in the team now for the last few years,” Barrett told Velo. “He was with our U19 team, he was with our Conti team, and he moved up the WorldTour last year. He’s an exceptional talent, but he’s also an exceptional bike rider, and also a really just good guy who wants to learn, who wants to progress, who asks questions. He is eager to just absorb as much as he can. He comes from a cyclocross background, so he doesn’t have a huge amount of training volume, and that’s now where we see he’s making big steps.”

Now that Seixas is adapting to elite-level training loads, his progression has skyrocketed. “He’s starting to train more like a WorldTour rider,” Barrett added. “He’s increasing volume, he’s increasing intensity... He still has a big margin for improvement. We’ll see where that brings him in the next few weeks, months, and years.”

Seixas's racing CV over the last year is staggering for a teenager. At just 18, he secured eighth overall at the Critérium du Dauphiné, won the Tour de l’Avenir, and shared a European Championship podium with Tadej Pogacar and Remco Evenepoel. This season, he followed up a second-place finish at the Volta ao Algarve by destroying the field at the Itzulia Basque Country, winning three stages and taking the overall title by 2:30 over Florian Lipowitz.

According to Barrett, the metrics behind these performances point to a genetically blessed athlete who possesses a massive VO2 Max and rare late-race durability.

“Already at such a young age, he’s extremely durable," Barrett explained. "He’s got a massive resistance to fatigue. We often see that develop with the more experience you have, and the older you get, but he has that already... Even in Liège, he was producing his best numbers on La Redoute, which this year was a heavy, heavy high kilojoule race.”

With the ability to climb with the world's best, time trial effectively, and descend flawlessly, Barrett admits the young Frenchman possesses the complete skillset. “He has the whole package. He can descend, he can time trial, he can climb. So it’s exciting working with him and seeing him develop and improve in the team."

Sending a 19-year-old French rider to the Tour de France with a French team is a massive psychological risk. France hasn't seen a home Tour winner since Bernard Hinault in 1985, and the immense pressure of the media has crushed plenty of young prospects before they even reached their prime.

Barrett admitted that the decision to throw Seixas into the deepest part of the cycling pool wasn't made lightly, with original plans pointing toward a more conservative debut at the Vuelta a España.

“Of course, it was a big discussion point within the team if it was the right thing to do, or not," Barrett revealed. "If you’re good enough, you’re old enough. I think originally we thought that he might do a different Grand Tour, he might do a Vuelta. But when you see his progression, I think it would be remiss of us not to expose him to this type of race."

Ultimately, the team believes that the experience of racing the Tour will only fast-track his development, regardless of the final result in July.

"We know he’s physically capable of doing it, we know what he can do, it is only going to make him better. The decision didn’t come lightly. It was discussed a lot between a lot of different people. Either way, he will learn something about himself and about what he needs to do to improve as well.”