Read the French media and you’ll surmise that next week’s Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (Critérium du Dauphiné to everyone else in cycling) will be a coronation of Paul Seixas’s greatness. It’ll be the Decathlon CMA CGM rider's second successive WorldTour stage victory off the back of winning three stages and four jerseys at April’s Itzulia Basque Country, confirming his status as one of the big three favourites at next month’s Tour de France. João Almeida and Isaac Del Toro will be merely making up the numbers for UAE Team Emirates-XRG. Apparently.
But there is one other rider who ought to be attracting attention – the only rider other than Tadej Pogačar this year to have beaten Seixas: Juan Ayuso. In February’s Volta ao Algarve, Ayuso’s first race for Lidl-Trek after his reported €10m winter move from UAE, the Spaniard beat the French wonderkid by 14 seconds. Just four years ago, at the age (19) Seixas is right now, Ayuso was the Spanish wonderkid, finishing third and on the podium in debut Grand Tour, the Vuelta a España.
Since then progression hasn’t been linear. There have been notable victories among his 18 professional wins – 2025’s Tirreno-Adriatico and two stages of the same year’s Vuelta, for instance – but mostly frustrations in Grand Tours, the events he’s ultimately judged by. He abandoned his maiden Tour in 2024 after two weeks with Covid, and had to withdraw from the 2025 Giro d’Italia after a bee sting; two days before had been third overall.
His route to the top of the UAE hierarchy was blocked by Pogačar, and increasingly so by Almeida and Del Toro, too. It was a crowded house, and Ayuso took the initiative to move on, signing a five-year deal with Lidl-Trek. It started well at Algarve, but then that familiar feeling of disappointment returned, when he crashed heavily while leading Paris-Nice after three stages, and then similarly pulled out of Itzulia after four days due to stomach issues.
Ayuso has the raw skills and talent to not just be competitive against his former UAE colleagues, as well as Seixas, Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel and Florian Lipowitz, but to beat them. Demonstrating that consistently, however, has often been his Achilles heel. Next week’s Dauphiné is his first race back, and his first race to show that he can be a contender at next month’s Tour.
For the past month Ayuso has been training at altitude in Spain’s Sierra Nevada along with most of the Tour de France peloton, fine-tuning his form and sharpening his legs before the biggest Grand Tour of the 23-year-old’s career so far. Despite the setbacks he’s endured this spring, Lidl-Trek are optimistic.
Ayuso was leading Paris-Nice in March before a crash ended his hopes. Image: Billy Ceusters/ASO.
“He was on the podium of his first Grand Tour so of course he’s a potential Grand Tour winner,” his teammate and fellow Spaniard Carlos Verona told Rouleur. “It means the talent is there. He needs to work on different things of course and every time cycling is more and more competitive but he has everything to be one of those Grand Tour winners.”
That includes the right leadership skills. Accusations were levied at Ayuso during his time with UAE that he didn’t want to work as a domestique for Pogačar, and that he had a strained relationship with Almeida. Verona read the rumours and reports and was swayed by them, but since getting to know Ayuso he has realised that perception was an incorrect one.
“I didn’t know him before but after I discovered the person he was, I realised that the stories in the media were not true. It’s not the reality,” Verona said. “He’s a really nice guy, super young, but with a lot of talent and experience for the age he is. He has everything a big leader needs. He still needs to improve many things but he’s on the way to being one of the great leaders of cycling in the next few years.”
Rather than being too disillusioned by the withdrawals at Paris-Nice and Itzulia, Verona views both episodes as a valuable learning curve. “I wouldn’t say I was happy but it’s part of the process,” the 33-year-old said. “You learn more from those bad experiences than you do winning. Algarve was super nice and everything was super good, and it was a good moment because it means you have talent, quality, everything is in the right place and the team is working well, but you learn more in the bad moments. It’s good to balance everything a little bit.
“I always believe that everything happens for a reason and hopefully the reason he didn’t win Paris-Nice nor Basque Country was because they weren’t the best races for him. That keeps him fresh for the Tour and we will see the best version of him this July.”
What awaits in July is anyone’s guess. A dream scenario, and one that is certainly attainable, is that Ayuso pulls on the yellow jersey in the city of his birth, Barcelona, after the opening stage’s team time trial. Beating Pogačar and Vingegaard over the three weeks is seen as highly unlikely, but that's not the objective this year.
“This is his second Tour but his first one as a leader,” Verona said. “With Juan you can't have too many expectations. We have to go day by day. We are in the process of him starting with a new team, new teammates and a new role in this race with new ambitions. So the key is not to put too much stress on him from day one. We have to trust the process, go step by step.
“If in July he’s on the podium, great for everyone. If he’s top-five and fighting until the end, we’ll also be happy. If he’s only top-10 because something happened in the race or he wasn’t able to be at the level he wished to be at, we should also be happy because we’ll learn from it and next year go towards the next step.”
