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"I wouldn't have bet a single centime on no Frenchman winning the Tour for forty years."
So said Bernard Hinault, the owner of what he called an "unwanted record" as the fourth decade since his 1985 victory was about to expire last July. "We haven't got any chance…" Hinault added in the same interview. Kevin Vauquelin's plucky seventh place on GC notwithstanding, it seemed unfathomable after three weeks that the drought wouldn't extend to forty-one years in 2026, forty-two and so on at least until Tadej Pogačar either began an inexorable slide or retired.
Unfathomable is also the adjective many long-in-the-tooth observers would use for the eventuality of Paul Seixas winning the 2026 race at age 19. It would certainly be historic, not only because Seixas would bring the Tour "home" for the first time since Hinault in 1985, but also because he would be the youngest ever winner: to be precise, 49 days younger than Henri Cornet in the Tour's second edition, way back in 1904.
Improbable it certainly sounds, and logic would suggest the same — and yet this summer France expects. Hopes. To a certain extent believes. And will certainly get extremely excited if, even after the first skirmishes with the Pyrenees in week one, the boy from Beaujolais has not been Pogcinerated out of contention.
Having witnessed Seixas's definitive coming of age at the Tour of the Basque Country in April, over three weeks in July, Daniel Friebe will take up potentially the story of the summer at the Tour de France. Not necessarily by chronicling Seixas's every pedal stroke but by examining the question of how France got here — now approaching half a century into one of professional sport's most agonising and baffling droughts — and how, one day either soon or still too far into the future for comfort, deliverance can and will finally arrive.
The 2026 Tour begins its journey in Barcelona — as does our series, outside a curious hospital building in the heart of the Catalan capital which, twenty years ago, was somehow charged with shaping the future of professional cycling. In episode one, Daniel explains exactly what occurred, and also why and how it determined the destiny of Paul Seixas.