The cycling prodigy Paul Seixas will make his Tour de France debut this year, raising hopes of France’s first male homegrown winner since 1985.

The 19-year-old Decathlon-CMA CGM rider has prompted intense debate in France after a dazzling start to 2026 with his team weighing the benefits of early exposure to the Tour against the risk of overburdening a rider still in his first season as a professional.

Seixas made the announcement on his team’s social media on Monday. “I’ve come here to announce to you something special, I have a race in July,” he tells his grandparents, before they guess that he is talking about the Tour. He will be the youngest rider to start a Tour in 89 years when the Grand Boucle begins in Barcelona on 4 July.

He won the Tour of the Basque Country in April, becoming the first Frenchman since Christophe Moreau at the 2007 Critérium du Dauphiné to claim a WorldTour stage-race title.

The Lyon-born rider, who has said his biggest dream is to win the Tour de France, is already being seen as a potential answer to France’s long wait for a first home victor since Bernard Hinault in 1985.

In 2025, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot became the first French rider to win the Tour de France Femmes, 36 years after her compatriot Jeannie Longo won the Tour de France Féminin.

Team management had indicated that Seixas’ programme would be assessed after the Ardennes classics, where he won the Fleche Wallonne before being beaten only by world champion Tadej Pogacar in the Liege-Bastogne-Liege race. It will be Seixas’s first grand tour and the only time he has tackled a race longer than eight days.

The 2026 Tour de France starts in Barcelona and finishes in Paris on 26 July.