'France probably hasn't had such a talent since Hinault' – Paul Seixas hype-machine continues after La Flèche Wallonne triumph

"ÉCLATANT" or "BRILLIANT" screams the front page of French sports daily newspaper L'Équipe today, beneath a photo of Paul Seixas winning La Flèche Wallonne.

The 19-year-old Decathlon CMA CGM rider had never raced the Mur de Huy before this week, but became one of the fastest ever up it to win Flèche on debut, the second ever winning debutant, and the youngest ever winner too. The question is no longer "can he win?" but "will he win?".

It's hard to understate the hype that surrounds Seixas at this moment. The teenager is on the front pages of French newspapers, is a lead item on French TV news, and reportedly has been the subject of the French president's attention, potentially to stop him moving away from a French team. For British audiences, his emergence is like that of Wayne Rooney as a footballer, part of the national sporting conversation. We are very aware that there is a generational talent on our hands, as we were when Tadej Pogačar burst into cycling in 2019.

Adam Becket

News editor at Cycling Weekly, Adam brings his weekly opinion on the goings on at the upper echelons of our sport in The Leadout, a newsletter series from Cycling Weekly and Cyclingnews. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here.

Seixas has won seven times this season, including a WorldTour stage race in Itzulia Basque Country, and is now a champion of an Ardennes Classic. He has won over a third of France's victories at WorldTour and ProTour level this year. He was the favourite for Wednesday, and now will go into Liège-Bastogne-Liège on Sunday as a top three favourite, only below Pogačar and Remco Evenepoel, two former winners and world champions.

"What can't Paul Seixas do? I don't know, but I do know that we will mainly enjoy this victory," Decathlon sports director Julien Jurdie told Sporza. He continued: "I have been a team manager for 25 years, but this is the best rider I have ever worked with. Romain Bardet gave me goosebumps back then, but I have never seen anything like this myself. This was a masterclass, pure class."

In L'Équipe, their chief cycling reporter, Alexandre Roos, writes today: "He is the standard-bearer of a French revolution, but that's a rather simplistic way of understanding the phenomenon, because it is in reality much more than that. France is certainly abuzz with excitement over this new talent, wondering if he will awaken fantasies buried so deeply, for so long, but the earthquake is much more global.

"Paul Seixas is the latest upheaval in cycling, its most advanced model, a more accomplished version than that of Tadej Pogacar who, at that age, wasn't even a professional and was still eating pizza."

"France… probably hasn't had such a talent since [Bernard] Hinault," Roos told us earlier this month, after the Itzulia triumph. "Seixas is riding very aggressively, fiercely, with panache; he is a modern cyclist in the same way as the current dominant riders, Pogačar, [Mathieu] Van der Poel, Evenepoel and so on, and that's quite new in France."

Unlike previous French hopes Romain Bardet and Thibaut Pinot, "for Seixas the hope to see him win all the big races in his career is there now, right from the beginning, at only 19 years old."

As the most promising talent France has seen in a generation, Seixas's team will be doing all they can to shield him from media pressure – he supposedly has a dedicated press officer. Roos added: "On the other hand, the media has to have a balanced approach and avoid overselling him or start hazardous comparisons with Hinault or Pogačar when he hasn't won that much yet. I think the pressure is one of the reasons why he must go to the Tour de France this year, to get used to it pretty early."

The Tour de France remains the big topic. It feels, at this moment, that he has to go to the Tour this summer; he is just that good, and the return will be so much better than any worries over too much too soon. Christian Prudhomme, the race's director, is confident that he will be there. He is only one of four WorldTour stage race winners this season, after all, and can climb with the best.

Could he even win? "I don't know, and we can't know," Roos cautioned. "But I would say that from what we see, he can be in the mix for the podium this year, and probably to win it in the next three years, depending on how Pogačar's level and motivation hold and also on how other talents like [Isaac] Del Toro or [Giulio] Pellizzari for instance develop."