Shouldering the hopes of a win-starved nation, can Paul Seixas bring home the yellow jersey at the Tour de France?

Bookmakers were thrown into panic in April when a French teenager won three stages and the overall at Itzulia Basque Country. They might not have heard of him, but at that moment, Decathlon CMA CGM's 19-year-old wonderkid Paul Seixas became the youngest rider in history to win a World Tour stage race – presenting the bookies with a problem. Could this upstart kid win the Tour de France? Too terrified to rule it out, they slashed Seixas's odds to 5/1, making him joint second-favourite, with two-time champion Jonas Vingegaard, to win the world's biggest race.

Surely the bookies were being overcautious. Not since 1937 has a rider younger than Seixas started the Tour, let alone won it. Besides, at the time of Itzulia, the Frenchman hadn't even committed to making his Tour debut – that would come a month later, with a social media video of him breaking the news to his grandparents.

As of today, the longest stage race Seixas has finished was just eight days. But the manner of his Itzulia victory showcased a physical maturity that makes those statistics practically irrelevant. Bolstered by the hopes of a home nation desperate to end a four-decade drought, Seixas arrives with the kind of boundless momentum that signals one of the most captivating Tour debuts ever.

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The youngster's rise has been genuinely unprecedented. After winning the junior time trial world title in 2024, he turned pro at 18, and has since won a major Classic (Flèche Wallonne), finished runner-up in a Monument (Liège-Bastogne-Liège), and podiumed at the elite European Championships, all before his 20th birthday.

Tadej Pogačar was, at the same age, yet to become a pro cyclist; as for Vingegaard, he was still working part-time in a fish factory. Even the great Eddy Merckx, the most prolific cyclist of all time, was 20 when he took his first of more than 500 victories. Seixas's physical talents are undeniable, then, but what no one can predict is how well he'll handle the psychological toll.

How does a 19-year-old shoulder the heavy hopes of a win-starved nation? France in July is a pressure cooker of national pride, catalysed by a media deprived of a homegrown champion since Bernard Hinault in 1985. It's a pressure that has, over the years, overwhelmed even hardened veterans. Now it's the turn of a teenager to try and bring the yellow jersey home.

Chris Froome is the earliest Tour winner Seixas remembers watching. He was just six years old when he sat alongside his paternal grandfather José Manuel following the 2013 edition on TV. Two years later, he started riding with local cycling club Lyon Sprint Evolution.

Seixas would visit his grandparents in the Alps regularly, and train on the 4km climb behind their house. At eight years old, he was already riding "as if he had three lungs", according to his former coach Marc Pacheco.

Yet anyone assuming this early promise translated into immediate, untouchable dominance would be mistaken. He was small for his age – "he had the motor of a Ferrari in the body of a Renault Twingo," Pacheco told RMC Sport.

Camille Charret, now of Cofidis, first met Seixas when the two were 12 and competing in the same local race circuit. "He was a very late bloomer, really thin, but still very strong for his size," Charret says. "He didn't win all the time. He won regularly, but not every weekend. He wasn't dominating."

That changed around the time Seixas and Charret became team-mates at VC Villefranche Beaujolais in 2021. Seixas won the under-17 national road championships that July, a breakthrough victory that cemented his promise but changed nothing about his character.

"He's very humble," Charret says, noting a laidback approach that extended to his team-mate's housekeeping – "when you're sharing a room with Paul, you can't be scared of mess," Charret laughs – and, crucially, in how he absorbed the weight of always being the favourite. "Even when the whole team was counting on him, he never seemed stressed. It's not at all in his nature."

Still, the Tour's a different beast to junior racing, and the French fans, for all their polka-dot-clad passion, can be demanding. Might Seixas fare differently with millions watching? Charret doesn't think so. "Knowing him, he's a bit – how can I say this without causing offence? – euphorique, a bit lost sometimes. I don't think he clocks everything," he says.

"He can be really detached from things, and that's an advantage in cycling because it means he doesn't know what's waiting for him. He doesn't put pressure on himself, because he knows what he can do. Clearly it works."

Seixas's ability to handle pressure will be tested as never before this July. Until now, he has risen to the hype; on his Strade Bianche debut, he finished second to Pogačar, and did the same at Liège-Bastogne-Liège, a race he won as a junior just two years ago.

When his Tour participation was announced in May, the media furore took on a new dimension. Former French pro Pierre Rolland hailed Seixas as "the chosen one" on L'Équipe's evening television show, saying he was "born to win" the Tour. National outlets Le Monde and France24 both labelled him a "prodigy".

Then, just three weeks ago, as Seixas-mania swelled, disaster struck. On the penultimate stage of the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, he crashed heavily, then somehow closed a four-minute gap to get back to the bunch before collapsing at the finish, childlike, in his father Emmanuel's arms. "I'll keep fighting until I have nothing left in my legs," the bloodied rider said afterwards.

That moment came the following day, when he was dropped on the opening climb and abandoned the stage, his arms heavily bandaged.

The race had been supposed to stamp Seixas as a main contender for the Tour. Instead, the bookies swung his odds back out to 10/1. L'Équipe published eight articles on its website documenting Seixas's crash and withdrawal. Le Figaro, one of the country's biggest national newspapers, published nine.

Fortunately, the injuries were inconsequential, but the saga served to remind that the rider described as "buitenaardse", or extraterrestrial, by Belgian outlet Sporza was, in fact, human. It also showed that, win or lose, Seixas remains a huge news story.

How, then, might the media approach his Tour debut? Alexandre Roos, L'Équipe's chief cycling writer, is wary of "overselling" Seixas's prospects. "The media has to have a balanced approach," he tells Cycling Weekly, "and avoid starting hazardous comparisons with Hinault or Pogačar when he hasn't won that much yet."

Roos believes Seixas is right to ride the Tour this year – to "get used to it early" – adding that the media should not be expected to treat him differently from any other high-profile rider. "His team particularly has to protect him, because they can't prevent the media from writing about him."

At Decathlon CMA CGM, Seixas has a designated press officer who deals with his interview requests. It's a measure only super-talents like Pogačar and Peter Sagan have had before him. In researching this feature, Cycling Weekly asked to speak to Seixas's coach and a sports director, but our requests were denied by the team; a press officer assured us it wasn't personal, it was policy.

To assist him further in navigating the pressure, the team has drafted in Romain Bardet as an aide – well qualified for the job as the last Frenchman to finish on the podium at the Tour (third in 2017) and joint holder of the best French GC result this century (second in 2016).

The man who shares that accolade with Bardet is Jean-Christophe Péraud, the 2014 Tour's runner-up. Did he find it hard to cope with the home pressure that year? "No, absolutely not. I was focused on my personal objectives in the race," Péraud says.

"I was also lucky that the media didn't take a lot of interest in me because I only went into second place after the time trial, the day before the Champs-Elysées. They were focused on Thibaut [Pinot] and Romain, the young guard. The media had chosen their little sweethearts, and I was protected behind that."

It also helped that Péraud was already a mature, experienced rider. A latecomer to road cycling, having started out in mountain biking, the Frenchman was 34 when he made his Tour debut, and 37 – almost twice Seixas's age – when he finished second. The expectations on him, he acknowledges, were not as great as they will be for his teenage compatriot.

Even so, he does not foresee Seixas being fazed by the furore this July. "It's about your mentality and how you apply it," Péraud says. "Performance is about maturity, and you can be mature in your discipline at 19 years old, just as you can be at 25, 30 or 35." He goes further. "It'll be easy for Paul. He knows what he wants and where he's going, and he's got the legs for it. I get the impression that media pressure just runs off him. [The team should] just let him be. He's ready."

The portrait of Seixas ahead of his Tour debut is one of a calm and fearless racer, a boy who can retreat into his bubble, undaunted by immense expectation. In interviews, he has seemed bullish about his prospects - prompting his maternal grandmother Annie to joke to Le Télégramme that he had "some nerve". Her grandson had been quoted in a team press release saying: "It is not in my nature, nor is it my conception of cycling, to compete in the Tour de France with the sole aim of learning the ropes."

The preparation is over. Seixas spent the second half of May on a training camp in Spain's Sierra Nevada, racking up more than 37,000m of climbing in just two weeks, before heading to the Pyrenees to recon the key mountain stages.

It's a lot of volume, a lot of stress on the body of a teenager; yet, as Seixas's results have shown, he isn't like other riders his age. Is there a serious chance he could upset the bookies? "He can be in the mix for the podium this year, and probably win it in the next three years," says L'Équipe writer Roos.

Decathlon CMA CGM are being more cautious. "At 19, in the Tour de France, there's no such thing as failure," said sports director Luke Rowe on his podcast Watts Occurring. "Being on the start line is already a success." The yellow jersey odds may be against him, but Seixas is ready to have a punt.