World champion Tadej Pogacar won a third straight Liege-Bastogne-Liege on Sunday after a thrilling battle with teenage French sensation Paul Seixas.
Pogacar romped to his 13th Monument victory and fourth in total at La Doyenne after finally cracking Seixas with 14km to ride of the 260km slog through the Ardennes, halfway up the last of 11 punchy climbs along the route.
Seixas came home 45 seconds later with Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel winning the sprint for third place from a large group 1min 42sec back.
“It means a lot to win again one of the biggest races of the year,” the UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider told Belgian television at the finish line.
In what was only his fifth race this year, Pogacar claimed a fourth victory — and three of those in Monuments — while his only blip was a second place behind Wout van Aert at Paris-Roubaix two weeks ago.
“I don’t have a lot of opportunities to win because I don’t race a lot,” added Pogacar.
“So it’s a lot of pressure for me to deliver on days like today.
“I’m really, really happy that we succeeded. I couldn’t be more proud of the team.”
But in 19-year-old Seixas, he now has a rival seemingly capable of pushing him to the limit.
“On the Redoute (climb) I was really going deep and I could see that Seixas was a little bit on the elastic,” said Pogacar.
“But on the top, he came next to me and I was like, okay, really impressed.”
At that point, he expected Seixas to stay with him to the finish.
“Maybe in the back of my head, I was already preparing to do a duel sprint because he was so strong.
“But I tried on (the) Roche-aux-Faucons (climb), I tried to keep my pace… It suits me super well and luckily he dropped.
“But I was prepared to go head-to-head in a sprint with him.”
It was Seixas’s first attempt at Liege and only his second ever Monument race having finished a distant seventh behind Pogacar at last October’s Tour of Lombardy.
“There wasn’t much in it, that was my first Liege, I wanted to give everything and that’s what I did,” said Seixas.
“In the end, Tadej was stronger.
“I was already on the limit at the top of La Redoute… I was feeling dizzy.
“After that I took my turn to pull, I said to myself ‘let’s see how it pans out at the end of the race’.
“He attacked again on La Roche-aux-Faucons, I wasn’t far off going over the top with him.”
But having won the Fleche Wallonne build-up race on Wednesday, Seixas continues to prove with every outing that he is Pogacar’s heir apparent.
Devastating attack
It was a lightning fast race from start to finish with hostilities launched straight after the chequered flag was dropped.
An early crash split the peloton in two, with Evenepoel in the front bunch and the other contenders behind.
They opened up a maximum lead of four minutes and the breakaway lasted 160km before Pogacar’s UAE Team Emirates outfit finally reeled them in.
That set up the inevitable charge into the Cote de la Redoute — the fearsome hill — where the winning move had been made in each of the previous four years: twice by Evenepoel (2022 and 2023) and then twice by Pogacar.
As expected, Pogacar made his devastating bid for victory there, some 35km from the finish.
And while he instantly distanced everyone else — there was one man who stuck to his wheel, fighting grimly to hold on all the way to the top, even over the steepest sections of the brutal climb.
They had an advantage of more than 30 seconds over a chase group by the top and that grew steadily to 1min 30sec over the next 20km to the shorter but steeper Cote de la Roche-aux-Faucons.
This time, though, Seixas could not hold on and 600 metres from the top of that, with 14km left, Pogacar finally cracked the young Frenchman’s resistence.
Seixas crested the climb 20 seconds behind Pogacar, and the race was run.
Source: Khaleej Times