Spin Cycle: The Pog top dog at Liège-Bastogne-Liège

Justifying their billing, the top three favourites occupied the first three places – but it wasn’t as simple as that.

In the final Monument of the European spring, with 210 kilometres covered and 50km remaining, there was a sense of the inevitable.

Seven climbs had been traversed. Four remained. None were longer than 4.4 kilometres – most were 2.5K or less – but what made this race so hard was that nine out of the eleven climbs occurred in the final 100K, not to mention the 4,101 metres of climbing on le menu du jour.

UAE Team Emirates-XRG, led by Pavel Sivakov for the last 30 kilometres, was leading the peloton. As far as domestique duties go, it was the ride of the day.

The 52-man early break, containing Remco Evenepoel of Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe, who won the Amstel Gold Race the Sunday previous and was considered one of three main pre-race favourites, had been mopped up 65 kilometres from the turnaround in Bastogne, and so, with just under 100km remaining, the situation remained status quo.

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The overwhelming favourite was, of course, Tadej Pogačar.

“I don’t do many races. I don’t have a lot of opportunities to win, because I don’t race a lot, so there’s a lot of pressure for me for to deliver on days like today,” he said afterwards.

Sunday April 26, the 112th edition of Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and the oldest of the five Monuments, marked only his fifth race day this season. Prior to that, he’d won three times (Strade Bianche, Milan-San Remo, Ronde van Vlaanderen) and finished second, at Paris-Roubaix, to Wout van Aert.

Pogačar won the previous two editions of L-B-L and a third in 2021. Evenepoel won in 2022 and ‘23. If the Slovenian were to win a fourth, he would be tied with Alejandro Valverde and Moreno Argentin, who both won La Doyenne (The Old Lady), as she’s affectionately known, on four occasions. Eddy Merckx holds the record for the most wins with five victories (1969, 1971-73, 1975).

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The third favourite also happened to be the youngest in the race.

You’d be forgiven if you didn’t immediately recognise his name, or know how to pronounce it, because the 19-year-old Frenchman has, until this year, seemingly come from nowhere.

Some pundits dismissed his chances. Perhaps rightly so, because prior to L-B-L, Paul Seixas (pronounced sec-sas) had only ridden two races over 250 kilometres in length.

They both happened last year, in his neo-professional season for Decathlon CMA CGM: the first was the road world championships in Kagali, Rwanda, where he finished in 13th place, 9’07 behind Pogačar; the second was at Il Lombardia, where he placed 7th, 4’16 in arrears of The Pog.

Till last Sunday, other than the 2025 Critérium du Dauphiné, those aforementioned races were also the only occasions Pogačar, Evenepoel and Seixas have raced together. (For what it’s worth, Evenepoel finished second in both.)

At 19 years and 214 days, not only was Seixas the youngest in the field by almost three years, he was also a Liège-Bastogne-Liège debutant; it was just his second Monument!

However two weeks prior he destroyed a WorldTour-quality field at the Itzulia Basque Country, also racking up a hat-trick of stage wins; and four days before Liège he made light work of the Mur de Huy, winning La Flèche Wallonne at a canter, and in so doing, set a new climbing record for the infamously precipitous slope.

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Coming with 32.4km remaining, the Côte de la Redoute, rated by cycling bible Procycling Stats as the sixth hardest of the eleven categorised climbs on offer, has nevertheless been the launchpad for more winning moves than any other in the storied history of Liège-Bastogne-Liège.

The last two editions, Pogačar made his move on the 1.6 kilometre climb with a 9.4% average and wasn’t seen again.

He tried again on Sunday but this time was different.

Four hundred metres in, Evenepoel was dropped, but The Pog could not shake the phenom that is Paul Seixas. Or did not want to – yet.

“Yeah man, on La Redoute, I was really going deep, and I would say that [Seixas] is like, a little bit on the elastic,” recalled Pogačar, “but on the top, he came next to me, and I was like, okay, ‘[I’m] really impressed’. And yeah, he was pulling quite strong all the way, and we opened a big gap, which was really good for us.

“Maybe in the back of my mind I was already preparing to do a sprint, because he was so strong.”

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Cresting the penultimate climb of the Côte des Forges (1.3km, 7.8%), the lead pair enjoyed a two-minute advantage; one of them was going to win La Doyenne.

In the back of his mind he was thinking about a possible sprint; however in the front of his mind he wanted to snap the elastic that was already stretched to its limit on La Redoute.

Just two-hundred metres into the Côte de la Roche-aux-Faucons (1.3km, 11%), the last ascent of the day and 14K from the finish, Pogačar gave Seixas a look…

A deadly seated acceleration followed one-hundred metres later.

The former took flight; the latter seemingly stood still.

When he won last year, Pogačar’s race-winning average speed was 41.983 km/h; it was the fastest in history. This year, on an almost identical parcours, it was 44.426 km/h.

“It means a lot to win again, one of the biggest races of the year, [and in] cycling,” said Pogačar, who will ride his first stage race of the season, the Tour de Romandie in Switzerland, starting Tuesday. Following that will be the Tour de Suisse from June 17-21, before Le Tour begins in Barcelona, Spain on July 4.

What’s your feeling after the race? Sunday’s runner-up was asked, who finished 45 seconds behind Pogačar. Impressively, Evenepoel recovered to win a 22-man sprint for third place.

“The feeling is really good,” responded Seixas with a smile, in excellent English.

“I’m really happy to be second and to make all the work [done by] the team pay [off] today. And, yeah, it’s a good feeling to (be here the) first time in Liège, and second [place] is pretty good.”

Good enough to go to the Tour de France, you’d have to say.

We’ll find out soon enough. Maybe by the end of this week, even.