“I will aim for the best possible ranking”: Paul Seixas announces that he will participate in his first Tour de France in July

“I have something to tell you.” In a clip posted on his social networks and those of his Decathlon CMA-CGM Team, Paul Seixas made the announcement that all of cycling in France was waiting for: he will participate in the Tour de France for the first time, from July 4 to 26.

“Next July, I will have a race”, reveals the French cycling crack to his grandparents in the short video published by his training. “The Tour de France? », asks his grandmother. “Yeah,” replies the 19-year-old Lyonnais, who will become the youngest rider to start the most prestigious stage race in 89 years, thus dethroning another Frenchman, Adrien Cento, who started at 19 years, 3 months and 26 days old in 1937.

Paul Seixas’ decision was eagerly awaited given the exceptional start to the season made by the young prodigy, already winner of seven races in his first year as a professional. Winner of a stage on the Tour de l’Algarve, the Ardèche Classic, three stage victories and the general classification at the Tour du Pays Basque and Flèche Wallonne in 2026, the Frenchman also challenged Tadej Pogacar on the Strade Bianche and Liège-Bastogne-Liège.

See you in Barcelona on July 4

The question of his participation in the Tour de France then came back insistently in the microcosm of French cycling, with some followers wanting to see him take on La Grande Boucle as quickly as possible, others fearing the unrivaled media and popular pressure of the Tour.

The Decathlon CMA-CGM team, which had given itself until the end of the spring classics to decide, therefore decided to bet on its nugget, who has never before participated in a race of this scale, starting this summer.

“I am really very happy to announce that I will participate in the next Tour de France,” confirmed the person concerned in a press release published by his team on social networks. “It is not my state of mind nor my conception of cycling to align myself with the Tour de France with the objective of discovery and I will aim for the best possible ranking,” he declared, already very ambitious.

We will therefore meet in Barcelona, ​​on July 4, to observe Seixas’s first steps in the (very) big world.