Last month we wrote about how Paul Seixas' chaotic appearance at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes was both an interruption to his otherwise serene rise this year and a wake-up call ahead of his hotly anticipated Tour de France debut.
Two days into the race, and the stresses and strains of the world's biggest bike race are already making themselves felt on the 19-year-old Frenchman.
Sunday's stage 2 was a chaotic affair, in which Seixas came alarmingly close to a collision with a race vehicle amid a frenzied chase back from a mechanical, and later barked instructions that were not heeded as his team crossed wires over race radio.
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The chaos began just ahead of the entry to the finishing circuit in Barcelona with just under 50km to go, as Seixas suffered a mechanical and had to grab the bike of his teammate, Aurélien Paret-Peintre, before changing again onto his spare and chasing fiercely with his teammate for a sustained period.
There was a hair-raising moment as they sped up past the convoy of race cars on a narrow stretch of road, and an organisation vehicle moved to the left and into their path, fortunately stopping and correcting just in time.
"I didn't panic too much, but I had to avoid a car that did not look in the rearview mirror. I was really scared there with Aurélien, it was very dangerous. When the road is is not so wide, the cars shouldn't go to the left, but the driver saw us in the end so it's all good," Seixas said later.
Seixas did manage to make it back to the peloton ahead of the real finale, which featured multiple laps of the up-and-down circuit around Barcelona's Montjuic park.
When his teammate Tiesj Benoot hit the front on the final climb in the closing metres, it looked like a statement of intent, but Seixas was still several wheels back, and in no position to attack.
"There was a small problem with the radios," Seixas revealed.
"I was trying to say to them that I lacked a little bit to be able to attack, but the team director didn't understand. He believed I was feeling 100% so he ordered Tiesj to ride, whilst I had no intention of attacking."
Seixas explained that he was caught behind a small split on the descent that followed that climb, leaving him on the back foot on the short final kick to the line, where he finished in ninth place, three seconds down on Tadej Pogačar, his winning teammate Isaac del Toro, and fellow rivals Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel.
"Honestly, given the circumstances, it's very good. Three seconds, it's not much, and it's a good start to the Tour. The most important thing is to have only lost a tiny bit of time.
"In the end, I had better legs than I thought, but I prefer to save them for later on."
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