Vuelta 2025 | Léo Bisiaux's First Three Weeks

Maybe it's the start of the final part of the season, maybe it's because everything in Spain is more relaxed and there's not the hustle and bustle of attention that there is at the Giro d'Italia and, especially, the Tour de France, maybe it's because it's the three-week stage race where there's more freedom, but for some time now the future has been revealed first at the Vuelta a España . It was in Spain that we first saw the talent of Tadej Pogacar grappling with three weeks . We appreciated the pedaling of Cian Uijtdebroeks , the stubborn mountain lightness of Florian Lipowitz, and the cycling boldness of Isaac Del Toro. Three protagonists (provided the Belgian can put bad luck and physical problems aside) of the stage races of today and especially tomorrow. Three riders who will have to deal with another cyclist who will be tackling his first three-week stage race at the Vuelta a España: Léo Bisiaux .

Since 1985, France has been searching for a rider capable of wearing the yellow jersey on the podium in Paris. Forty years of obsessions, disappointments, dreams, and illusions gone awry. Forty years of waiting weighs tons, capable of hardening legs, crushing willpower, annihilating talent. If you even feel the weight. Forty years is exactly double the lifespan of the Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale rider. And Léo Bisiaux doesn't feel the weight of this wait, he doesn't even notice it. The French rider is in no rush to race the Tour de France; he hasn't even considered the possibility of one day fighting to win it. And not out of false modesty. Simply because for him, cycling is still something as light-hearted as his bouncing along mountain roads.

Because for him, the bicycle is still, above all, a discovery. And the one with narrow wheels, which goes fast on paved roads, is not the only one, it is not the most pleasant, nor even the most desirable. Léo Bisiaux grew up with dreams of dirt roads, he finds much more satisfaction in pedaling on the dirt tracks of cyclocross, he would prefer to have no limits, enjoying the absolute freedom of not having to choose that a gravel bike provides. But he knows that it is on the asphalt that he will one day be able to guarantee himself the possibility of choosing, of doing what most gratifies him. And so he takes everything that comes his way with the joy of one who perceives no constraints but only advantages.

Léo Bisiaux grew up under the free example of Mathieu van der Poel, Wout van Aert, and Thomas Pidcock, with the idea that there are no barriers to pedaling. And in this fluid cycling style, he found himself riding fast almost without realizing it, with his slightly dazed but always attentive look and absolute happiness in his eyes. His Bugo-like face smiles even when he's struggling.

In his first season as a professional, he already managed to win a stage. He did so at the Vuelta a Burgos, beating Giulio Ciccone, Giulio Pellizzari , and Isaac Del Toro to the slightly uphill finish line in Valpuesta.

The Vuelta was an early-season possibility, a winter "who knows, maybe, we'll see." It became an August reality, a chance earned on the road, the fruit of unexpected cycling maturity.

Thus, Léo Bisiaux will be three weeks ahead of the other French rider who is giving hope to French cycling fans: his teammate Paul Seixas . The eighteen-year-old from Lyon (he turns nineteen in September) will race this year's Tour de l'Avenir after surprising himself and his rivals in the Tour of the Alps and the Critérium du Dauphiné. For him, too, next year's Vuelta should be his first step into the world of three-week races. But there are still twelve months to wait.

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