KM0: Seixy Basque
The Cycling Podcast
The Cycling Podcast
4.7 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2026
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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To say that Paul Seixas has taken the world of professional cycling by storm this spring would be an understatement of similar proportions to the 19-year-old Frenchman’s gift for riding bicycles.
His victory in Flèche Wallonne was just the latest in a series of jaw-dropping performances in 2026. That first win in a World Tour one-day race was preceded and no doubt informed and abetted by an equally remarkable display in Itzulia or the Tour of the Basque Country, where Seixas took three stage wins and cruised to the overall title.
Daniel Friebe was in Spain that week to witness the definitive explosion of a cycling superstar. In this special episode, we go on a journey into the heart of the race, as history is made and the future of the sport rewritten.
Seixy Basque was written and produced by Daniel Friebe. Art is by Daniel Friebe. The episode features music by Blue Panda and Amaraterra.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There is a joke in the Basque |
| 0:03.3 | a store |
| 0:08.0 | A bollabino |
| 0:10.0 | A man from Bilbao |
| 0:12.0 | A man from Bilbao |
| 0:16.0 | walks into a store and asks for a world map of Bilbao. |
| 0:20.0 | In reply, the shop owner asked whether that's the right bank of their Nervion River or the left bank. |
| 0:26.8 | As Mark Kulanski writes in his book, The Basque History of the World, |
| 0:31.0 | the Basques don't believe they are at the centre of the world because they think they are the world. |
| 0:36.6 | Another oft-quoted author on Basque identity and indeed a friend of mine, Ander Izagir, writes |
| 0:42.3 | something similar in his Werta al-Pais de Alcano. |
| 0:45.7 | We come from a country so small that you can cross it in a morning. |
| 0:50.1 | Yet we behave as if it were the centre of a vast, mysterious universe. |
| 0:55.2 | The second week of April is generally speaking a bad time to put on a professional bike race |
| 0:59.9 | that is not the Tour of Flanders or Pari Roubaix. |
| 1:03.2 | Most would indeed argue that for eight days the Ronda and the Hell of the North |
| 1:06.8 | are as all encompassing for a cycling fan as the Bass territory is to their natives. |
| 1:12.1 | And yet precisely the people from this region have found a way, a reason to annually avert their |
| 1:17.0 | gaze from the cobbles of Northern Europe when such distraction might seem like heresy. |
| 1:23.5 | I had never attended the tour of the Basque Country or Idzulia before this year. |
| 1:28.3 | If I finally decided to do so, it was also because I had a hunch that for at least a few |
| 1:32.7 | afternoons in April 26, the Earth's axis may indeed be located somewhere in the wooded hills |
... |
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