It's not difficult to find the dawn within the dusk, if your name is Paul Seixas and your twenties are blowing behind you. While everything around speaks of the end - from the energy to the glimmer of a group tackling the last race of the year to the nickname of the race itself, 'Classic of Dead Leaves' - the rising French star decides to remove the participle from the phrase forever: around Lake Como, today, a star has established itself. She asserted herself with arrogance, pulling away from her opponents one by one on the grim slopes of the Civiglio, and then pedaling alone in the last 18 kilometers - with the taste in her heart and the adrenaline in her legs of her first Classic Monumento coming up.
"A career-changing moment", he acknowledges at the finish line, even more so if the triumph is made by a boy of just 20 years and 16 days. The youngest ever, on the roads of the Giro di Lombardia. The record had stood since the first edition, in 1905, won by Giovanni Gerbi, with whom Paolo Conte would fall in love decades later, so much so that he would become immortal. Another era, a cycling so brutal that it led the Piedmontese chansonnier to invite the 'Red Devil' to 'forget the road', stop to drink an orangeade and realize that 'all the time goes away against the light'.
And who knows what Paul Seixas was thinking as the October light skimmed the final ramps of the San Fermo della Battaglia, the last rough patch of the day. He too, after a very tough race, had been brutal and had crushed the competition on the Civiglio: Remco Evenepoel and Isaac Del Toro, his most esteemed opponents, melted like snow in the sun on his violent progression from a seated position; Enric Mas, Tom Pidcock and Giulio Ciccone, the last to resist him, had not resisted the distance and were now chasing without hope.
He was thinking, perhaps, of his child self, "of ten-year-old Paul" who - he says at the finish line - if they told him now where he would arrive in just a decade "he wouldn't believe it. I'm still young, sometimes it still doesn't seem true to me". A youth to which he doesn't give much, to be honest: no less than two weeks ago, at the end of a World Cup he competed as a protagonist but in which he arrived with cramps, it was very hard: "It's a child's mistake - he commented -. I'm ashamed of myself, France doesn't deserve a leader like that". This time, the tones can be more relaxed, and with joy this twenty-year-old can confess that "the whole season has been a dream, but this moment is exceptional".
Behind him, Enric Mas finishes second, who after his exploits in the Vuelta can greet 2026 more than satisfied. Third is Giulio Ciccone, in his last race with Lidl-Trek, yet another placing in a season that has mocked him several times, especially last Sunday at the European Championships: "I had strange sensations in the race, I got the most of what I could", he acknowledges at the finish line.
The eyes of the world, however, as great road cycling looks forward to 2027, are all on Seixas. His present is a promise of a future: no one, not even the convalescent Tadej Pogacar, will be able to sleep peacefully.
