There was a touching moment just beyond the finish line of stage 7 of the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. Maybe a minute after Paul Seixas had been helped from his bike, his legs giving way momentarily, the young Frenchman, still a teenager, was helped back up to his feet and embraced by his waiting family.
Few words passed between them. Paul, the taller of the three Seixas men, stooped slightly to drape his blood-streaked right arm around his grandfather who whispered something into the ear of his ghostly-pale grandson. Then all three broke apart and Paul turned his back, returning to the job of recovering, evaluating and cleaning himself up for the podium ceremony where he’d receive the prize for the day’s most combative rider.
Paul Seixas's grandparents live in the Haute-Savoie region, so didn't have far to travel to see their grandson arrive atop Grand Colombier. The circumstances were not quite as expected, though.
A couple of hours earlier, the younger Seixas had been engaged in a desperate chase after crashing less than 40 km into the stage. At the time, the peloton had only just been released from a temporary neutralisation on the first long descent of the day, as loose gravel made the roads treacherous.
“I just made a stupid mistake, it’s entirely my fault, and I apologise to the lads around me who I could have caused to crash as well,” Seixas said in the mixed zone afterwards. “I took a corner badly. I tried to take the outside line, I thought the others weren’t coming round fast enough, but in fact I went into the bend far too fast.
Did we do a good job with this story?
