Twenty Years & Sixteen Days: Seixas Breaks Three Records at Il Lombardia

Paul Seixas rode away from the best one-day climbers in the world on the Civiglio, 18 kilometres from Como, and won Il Lombardia alone by 48 seconds. He is 20 years and 16 days old. Those are the Il Lombardia 2026 results in two sentences, and they come with a record sheet. Seixas broke three records on Saturday 10 October: he is the youngest winner in the race’s 120 editions, he climbed the Civiglio 38 seconds faster than Tadej Pogačar did in 2022, and he is the youngest rider to win any Monument since 1944. Enric Mas was second. Giulio Ciccone was third. Remco Evenepoel, the favourite, led the sprint for fourth, 1:20 down.

Pogačar was not on the start line, and for the first time since 2020 somebody else won. Below is everything you need from the 239 kilometres between Bergamo and Como: how many records Seixas broke and what each one replaced, how the race was won, the climb data, where he now sits among the youngest Monument winners in history, and what it means for the rider who was not there.

How many records did Paul Seixas break at Il Lombardia?

Three, and each one is worth reading on its own terms. Records in cycling are often soft: a stat built for a press release, a “youngest since” with a carefully chosen start date. These are not.

The first is the race record. Seixas was born on 24 September 2006, which made him 20 years and 16 days old on the Como lakefront. The previous youngest winner of Il Lombardia was Giovanni Gerbi, who won the very first edition in 1905 at 20 years and 161 days. That mark had survived 121 years and every great climber who came after Gerbi. Seixas beat it by 145 days.

The second is a climbing record. The Civiglio is 4.2 kilometres at 9.7 percent, the penultimate climb and the place where this race is usually decided. Velon’s timing gave Seixas 11:54 from bottom to top. The benchmark was Pogačar’s 12:32, set in 2022 on his way to the second of his five straight wins. Seixas went 38 seconds faster, after more than five hours of racing and more than 4,000 metres of climbing.

The third is the one that puts him in the history books beyond this race. No rider had won any of cycling’s five Monuments at a younger age since Rik Van Steenbergen won the Tour of Flanders in 1944. That is 82 years. Only three riders in history won one younger, and all three did it before the end of the Second World War. Eddy Merckx, by comparison, won his first Monument at 20 years and 275 days.

Then there are the firsts, which are not records but matter just as much at home. Seixas is the first French winner of Il Lombardia since Thibaut Pinot in 2018, and the first French winner of any Monument since Julian Alaphilippe at Milan-Sanremo in 2019. It was also the first Monument victory for his team, Decathlon CMA CGM. That is three records and three firsts in one afternoon, from a rider who was a teenager for most of the season.

Il Lombardia 2026 results: how Seixas won

The race ran 239 kilometres from Bergamo to Como, the reverse of the 2025 direction, with more than 4,600 metres of climbing. The early part of the day went over the Selvino, the Colle di Berbenno and the Valpiana, the longest climb of the race at 10.4 kilometres. Then came the new ascent to Giovenzana, the Madonna del Ghisallo with 60 kilometres to go, and a finale that climbed San Fermo della Battaglia, the Civiglio and San Fermo again before dropping into Como.

It started late. Before the flag dropped, the riders held a five-minute protest over safety on the roads, with Evenepoel among those leading it. TOUR reported that the riders cited a string of accidents this season, including the death of Finlay Tarling. When the racing began it went straight out of the neutral zone, and midway up the Selvino five riders got clear. Over the top they were joined by more, and a 14-rider break formed with Ben O’Connor, Antonio Tiberi, Michael Leonard, George Bennett and Victor Campenaerts among them. On the long descent after the Valpiana, about 150 kilometres from the line, its lead peaked at about three minutes.

UAE Team Emirates-XRG controlled the chase through the middle of the day, then handed over to Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe on the Ghisallo. The break reached the foot of the climb 2:30 ahead, and the gap dropped under two minutes as the favourites’ pace went up. O’Connor attacked from the break with 68 kilometres to go. Near the top of the Ghisallo, Louis Barré of Visma | Lease a Bike started a move with Matteo Jorgenson, Quinn Simmons, Brandon McNulty and Christian Scaroni. It opened about 15 seconds and lasted a few kilometres before Giulio Pellizzari brought it back for Red Bull.

That was Red Bull’s plan for the day: use Pellizzari, one of the best young climbers in the sport, as a domestique for Evenepoel and make the race too hard for anyone to attack. The leaders were 1:20 ahead with 35 kilometres to go. On the first climb of San Fermo, Pellizzari drove again, and with 20 kilometres to go the last of the break was only 40 seconds clear. It was a fast race. It also left Evenepoel with nobody beside him when the Civiglio started.

Seixas made his move about 18 kilometres from the finish. It was not a jump. Beyond the Peloton described him coming up from the back of the group after Adam Yates had set a very high pace, then riding the others off his wheel while seated. The official race report put it the same way: a hard, steady tempo rather than a sudden surge. Evenepoel was the first to go. Isaac del Toro and McNulty followed. Tom Pidcock and Ciccone held on longest and then cracked as well. Seixas caught Leonard, the last of the break, and crossed the top of the Civiglio alone, between 25 and 30 seconds clear depending on whose timing you read.

From there it was, in his words, “like a time trial” and “me against myself”. He took the technical Civiglio descent cleanly. On the last climb of San Fermo the gap grew to nearly a minute with five kilometres left. “When I crested San Fermo della Battaglia for the final time, I knew I had done it,” he said afterwards. Behind him, Mas caught and dropped Ciccone. Seixas rode along the lakefront alone and crossed the line in 5:49:28, an average of 41 km/h over one of the hardest one-day courses of the year.

The margin is part of the story too. Forty-eight seconds is the fourth-largest winning margin in the last 30 editions of Il Lombardia, according to Beyond the Peloton. This was not a rider surviving at the front. It was a rider extending his lead on every climb after the decisive one, while a group of seven world-class riders behind him could not agree on who should chase. 174 riders started and 114 finished, according to Cyclingnews.

The Civiglio record, in numbers

Climbing records are only as good as the timing behind them, so it is worth being clear about what was measured. The 38-second figure comes from Velon’s timing of the full climb: 11:54 for Seixas against 12:32 for Pogačar in 2022. Escape Collective and IDL Pro Cycling both reported it. Strava splits the Civiglio into two overlapping segments, and Seixas was faster on both: 8:45 against 9:09 on the lower 2.89 kilometres, and about 7:08 against 7:29 on the upper 2.24 kilometres. Because the two segments overlap, they cannot be added together.

La Gazzetta dello Sport’s figures, reported by CyclingUpToDate, put his effort at about 460 watts on average with a peak of 620, at an average speed of 19.86 km/h and a VAM of about 2,031 metres per hour. Domestique calculated about 7.1 watts per kilogram. Those are third-party estimates, not data from the team, and CFP treats them that way. Strava’s automatic filter, which is built to catch rides recorded in cars and on motorbikes, also rejected eight of his segments, RMC reported. That says how fast the climb was. It says nothing else.

There is a fair caveat, and IDL Pro Cycling raised it. Pogačar did not race on Saturday, so this was a race against a clock, not a rider. His 2022 time was set four years ago, and the whole peloton has become faster since. Ciccone also beat Pogačar’s time on the lower section, in 9:04. A record against a benchmark is still a record. It just is not the same thing as a head-to-head, and Seixas was the first to say so.

The youngest Monument winners: where Seixas ranks

Seixas is fourth on the all-time list of youngest men’s Monument winners. The three riders above him are Victor Fastre, who won Liège-Bastogne-Liège in 1909 at 18 years and 362 days; Georges Ronsse, who won Liège in 1925 at 19 years and 102 days; and Rik Van Steenbergen, who won the Tour of Flanders in 1944 at 19 years and 206 days. All three won in a sport that looked nothing like today’s: smaller fields, fewer international riders and, in 1944, a war.

That is what makes the third record the strongest of the three. In the modern era, with full international fields and teams built around data, nobody has done it younger. Merckx was 20 years and 275 days old when he won Milan-Sanremo in 1966. Bernard Hinault was 22 at Liège in 1977. Pogačar was 22 when he won Liège in 2021. Seixas beat all of them to his first Monument, and it was only his third Monument start: seventh at Il Lombardia in 2025, second at Liège in April, first on Saturday.

The season that built the win

None of this came from nowhere, and the season shows it. In April Seixas won La Flèche Wallonne on his debut, which CyclingUpToDate reported made him the youngest winner in that race’s history too. A few days later he was second at Liège. He won the Tour of the Basque Country overall. In July he rode his first Tour de France at 19 and finished fourth overall, 11:56 behind the winner, in a race CFP covered in our Grand Tours season dossier.

The autumn was harder. At the Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal he put in the winning move and lost a two-up sprint to Isaac del Toro. At the World Championships in Montréal two weeks later, CFP wrote that he could open a world championship but had not yet proved he could close one against a faster finisher. He finished 15th, and he told reporters he was “extremely disappointed”. Il Lombardia, with no sprint at the end and a long climb close to the finish, was the answer to that problem. He did not need to beat anyone in a sprint. He just needed to be the strongest rider on the Civiglio.

By CyclingUpToDate’s count, Saturday was his eighth win of 2026. Beyond the Peloton counted only three finishes outside the top ten in his career in WorldTour-level one-day races, none worse than 17th. In one-day races decided on climbs of ten minutes or longer, Beyond the Peloton counted one win and two second places this season. That is the profile of a rider who should win Il Lombardia. The surprise is not that he did it. It is that he did it at 20.

Mas, Ciccone and the race behind

The best ride behind Seixas came from Mas. Four weeks after he won the Vuelta a España in Granada and ended a twelve-year wait for a Spanish Grand Tour winner (our stage 21 report), he was the only rider who gained time on the chasers after the Civiglio. He crossed the top with Ciccone about 30 seconds behind Seixas, dropped him on the last San Fermo and finished 48 seconds down, 32 seconds clear of the Evenepoel group.

Ciccone was third in his last race for Lidl-Trek, 1:05 down. It added another podium to a season of them, a week after he lost the European title to Evenepoel in a photo finish that CFP reported in detail. Behind him, seven riders came to the line together at 1:20: Evenepoel, McNulty in the rainbow jersey, Pidcock, Pello Bilbao, Scaroni, Filippo Zana and Mathys Rondel. Evenepoel won the sprint for fourth. CyclingUpToDate reported that he said afterwards he did not come for fourth place.

That is the honest verdict on Red Bull’s day. The team made the race hard, and it did suit a climber. It just suited the wrong one. With Pellizzari used up before the Civiglio, Evenepoel had no teammate to pace him when Seixas went and no way to organise a chase among rivals who all wanted somebody else to work. Was that a tactical mistake, or simply the cost of racing against a rider who climbed faster than anyone has on that road?

What Il Lombardia 2026 means for Seixas and Pogačar

The obvious question hangs over the result, and Seixas raised it himself. Pogačar had won the previous five editions. His season ended with the crash at the Vuelta that CFP reported on stage 8, and UAE Team Emirates-XRG has confirmed he will not race again in 2026. He has also extended his contract with the team until 2032. So the youngest Il Lombardia winner in history won the first edition since 2020 that the best rider in the world missed.

That does not take anything away from the records. Gerbi’s age record was never going to fall to Pogačar, and the Civiglio time was set against the clock. But it does set the terms for next autumn. “Maybe I will never beat him, but I will always try,” Seixas said. It is a modest answer from a rider who has just done what nobody had done in 121 years, and it is the right one. The comparison that matters will be made on the same climb, in the same race, with both of them in it.

For now, the Il Lombardia 2026 results say this: a 20-year-old from Decathlon CMA CGM won the last Monument of the season alone, by 48 seconds, and broke three records doing it. “I’ve made my dream come true,” he said at the finish. He has also made a lot of people rewrite their expectations for 2027. Where do you think he goes next: the Tour, the Ardennes, or straight back to Como to defend it against the rider he could not race this time?

Sources

• Il Lombardia (official) — race report: 239 km, 5:49:28, average 41.033 km/h, top five, the Civiglio move, Gerbi’s 1905 record, Seixas quotes
• Cyclingnews — race report: 14-rider break, peak gap, Ghisallo move, gaps at 35 and 20 km, top ten, 174 starters
• TOUR — youngest winner, rider protest, first French winner since Pinot, Decathlon’s first Monument, “me against myself”
• CyclingUpToDate — ages of the youngest Monument winners, Gerbi’s record, French benchmarks, Seixas’s 2026 season
• Escape Collective — the Civiglio record: 38 s faster than Pogačar in 2022; climb profile
• IDL Pro Cycling — Strava and Velon analysis: 11:54 against 12:32, segment splits, caveats
• CyclingUpToDate — Civiglio segments, Gazzetta power figures, Strava’s rejected segments
• Beyond the Peloton — tactical takeaways, margin history, Seixas’s one-day record
• We Love Cycling — Seixas quotes on the win, Pogačar and the Worlds
• ProCyclingUK — result, O’Connor and Leonard moves, Ciccone’s last race for Lidl-Trek
• CyclingFlash — full result with teams and gaps
• CyclingUpToDate — route preview: climb lengths, gradients and distances to go
• Cyclingnews — Pogačar will not race again in 2026; contract extended to 2032
• CyclingUpToDate — Evenepoel on finishing fourth

Related reading

• European Championships: Evenepoel by three millimetres, Ciccone still asking
• Montréal road races: McNulty’s solo and Vollering’s first rainbow jersey
• The Rainbow Has No Owner: our Worlds preview on del Toro and Seixas
• The 2026 Grand Tours season dossier
• Finlay Tarling and the 800 metres cycling must explain
• More race results

CFP is a cycling news digest. This report is built from the published results and the independent coverage listed above. The elevation profile and gap chart are labelled schematics, not surveyed altimetry or transponder traces; altitudes and some intermediate gaps are illustrative. Race distance is 239 km per the organiser; CyclingFlash lists 240 km. Seixas’s attack is placed at about 18 km to go per Cyclingnews and Escape Collective; Beyond the Peloton gave 19.3 km and We Love Cycling about 20 km. The gap at the top of the Civiglio was reported as 25 s by Cyclingnews and 30 s by the organiser and TOUR. The Civiglio record uses Velon’s full-climb timing as reported by IDL Pro Cycling and Escape Collective; Strava segment times and power figures are third-party estimates. The ages of pre-war Monument winners are as published by CyclingUpToDate. Results are as published on 10 October 2026 and may be amended by the UCI.