Paul Seixas recognised that his professional team time trial debut at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes on Tuesday did not go as well as expected, but the 19-year-old French star said he is determined to set the record straight in the five stages that remain in the week-long French race.
On a tough 28-kilometre test over constantly undulating rural roads, the Decathlon CMA CGM leader limited his losses to 45 seconds and seventh place to stage winners Visma-Lease a Bike and their American race leader Matteo Jorgenson.
Widely considered the top pre-race favourite in the GC battle, Seixas is now twelfth overall, exactly a minute down on yellow jersey Alex Baudin (EF Education-EasyPost). Rivals as dangerous as Oscar Onley (Netcompany Ineos) are now 48 seconds ahead of the Frenchman, 2024 race runner-up Jorgenson is 45 seconds up, too, and Juan Ayuso (Lidl-Trek) enjoys a 13-second advantage.
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That means Seixas will have to turn on the power in the mountains this weekend if he wants to maintain his chances of going for the overall victory. But as the Frenchman said, on a day where Decathlon started off a man down following Matthew Riccitello's enforced abandon on stage 1 due to illness then quickly lost another, Swiss TT specialist Stefan Bissegger, early in the stage, the TTT scenario was hardly in their favour right from the get-go.
"There's a certain sense of disappointment, we finished below our expectations, but we have to keep the circumstances in mind," Seixas told L'Équipe afterwards.
"We lost Stefan early on and unfortunately that did some harm to the team's chances, and we didn't have Matthew right from the start, so we were rapidly down to five. And five against seven [in the other teams] - that's complicated."
"But we made do with what we had, Dan [Hoole] was very good, Aurélien [Paret-Peintre], Nico [Prodhomme] et Léo [Bisiaux], too, we all did what we should. At the end, I felt very strong, we did the best we could."
L'Équipe asked the young French star what he had said on the team bus after the TTT, where apparently he took a moment to address his teammates about their collective performance.
"I told them this kind of day can happen, that it's not serious, we're going to get back in the game, it's not like we lost three minutes. You have to keep your head high and move onwards as best you can," he replied.
Seixas refused to define his TTT setback as major, given that he was not too far off riders like Ayuso and was ahead of Del Toro. As for the time taken by Jorgenson and Netcompany Ineos duo Kévin Vauquelin and Oscar Onley, 45 and 48 seconds respectively, he recognised they had gained a fair amount of time, "which is not ideal. But it's not definitive."
Decathlon CMA CGM management had said pre-stage, too, that they wanted Seixas to get a chance to race at least one team time trial before the Tour de France, and although the squad's performance was somewhat below expectations, that objective has been fulfilled.
What will perhaps be most interesting now is seeing how or if Seixas, despite his relative youth, bounces back this week from one of his rare setbacks in a brilliant season: his words to his teammates on the team bus perhaps already indicate that he's already looking to put this semi-defeat behind him and see how he can set the record straight in the fast-approaching mountains.
"At the finish, we lost some time on some of the leaders, but nothing is decided yet," Seixas insisted in a post-stage team statement. "There are still five stages to go and we'll keep fighting."
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