Some look down. Others rock from side to side. A brave few rise from their saddles, though they cannot stay there for long. And as they climb past six shrines on the side of the road, prayers are hyperventilated to the skies.
Usually, a WorldTour peloton passes the roadside with a sonic boom of displaced air; a kaleidoscope of sound and fury that is felt rather than truly seen. Not here, as riders lurch through the finishing barriers as if in slow motion, barely parting the wispy smoke of frying onions. These are speeds the rational mind can comprehend, if never hope to match; they move so slowly that the closest spectators can almost count the lines of suffering on the riders’ contorted brows.
This is the Mur de Huy — possibly Belgium’s most famous climb. By its final ascent, in the 90th edition of La Flèche Wallonne, it will have delivered two champions, one old, one new, in Demi Vollering, the year’s dominant female rider, and 19-year-old Paul Seixas, perhaps the most talented teenager that cycling has ever seen.
It is April and it is wisteria season, their violet bodies line Huy’s stone walls like a descending peloton. Looming above is what locals simply call the Mur, the wall, and it truly is, a fence of rock and forest which hems the town tight to the Meuse River.
Here, the Mur caps the horizon of both the landscape and the imagination. ‘Huy’ is stencilled every twenty metres across the road, a guttural syllable — say a hard ‘h’ and rhyme it with oy — which suitably evokes both romance and the need to retch, its ‘u’ italicised on the tarmac as if it, too, has run out of energy and slumped to the side.
The raw facts, when listed, do not quite do the climb justice — a 1.3km ramp at an average gradient of 9.8 per cent — thought it does feature one brutal left-handed kink of 26 per cent at halfway up. In Flèche Wallonne, the men’s peloton ride it three times, the women twice, with both races finishing at its summit.
Fans make their way up the Mur early on Wednesday afternoon (Jacob Whitehead/The Athletic)
The brutality of this climb lies in its length. Somehow, it feels like cycling’s version of the track 400m, a race short enough to be sprinted, but a distance that the human body is not made to sprint.
“You know it’s going to be the most painful four minutes of the year,” said Alpecin-Fenix’s Puck Pieterse post-race, winner last year, second this time around. She was asked, in a follow-up, what thoughts were running through her mind as she desperately closed on Vollering’s back wheel.
Her reply could be a tagline for the race: “I was thinking ‘ow’.”
Flèche Wallonne is part of this region’s identity; it differs from its older and more storied cousin Liège-Bastogne-Liège, to be raced on Sunday, by both feeling more localised and by including Wallonia in its name.
In the 19th century, this town of 21,000 was known as ‘city of millionaires’, thriving on both the coal and textile business, but Wallonia’s star waned as Flanders’ flourished, the southern French-speaking half of Belgium struggling in the aftermath of deindustrialisation.
This race is something for them, the town centre built on cycling. A local deli sells ‘Van der Poulet’ bagels, while from the riverside on raceday, a steady stream of camping chairs, coolboxes, and scarcely believable quantities of charcuterie meat are hauled to the Mur’s slopes, serenaded by an impromptu balcony DJ set, many groups travelling faster than the cars sputtering uphill with them.
“It’s mythical,” says Yves, a lifelong Huy resident. “It’s part of our heritage, and that’s why it’s important.”
Others have more complex feelings. “It’s weird, in the sense that for a couple of days each year, it’s not our street anymore,” says Gilles, who has lived in a pretty house directly on the Mur, just 50 metres from the finish line, for the past five years.
“These guys from France come with a very strange accent and tell us how we should behave. But we are happy to share it with strangers.”
Yves, a resident of Huy, attends the race every season (Jacob Whitehead/The Athletic)
Gilles’ neighbours include seven small whitewashed shrines, giving the climb its alternative name of Le Chemin des Chapelles (The Path of the Chapels).
Essentially, Flèche Wallonne is a race to the Church of Notre-Dame de la Sarte at its summit, a chapel that inspired feverish devotion in the 17th century after a story which involved a small statuette of the Virgin Mary which was providentially too heavy for a local woman to steal by slipping it into her woodpile. Perhaps the Virgin Mary cycled up; it would explain why she was so heavy-legged.
But amidst this tradition, there is a small sense that Flèche Wallonne has lost some of its old prestige. At points in its history, it rivalled Liège-Bastogne-Liège for importance — both were once raced consecutively as part of an ‘Ardennes Weekend’, with Flèche given the plum Sunday slot.
There have been complaints about both the race’s shortened length — from 240km down to 200km — and its predictable pattern, with the past 24 editions ending in the peloton bunched at the bottom of the final climb, ready for a painful drag race to the top. From another perspective, the uniqueness of the final five kilometres are what makes Flèche Wallonne unique — no other WorldTour race so resembles an en-masse hill-climb contest.
The Church of Notre-Dame de la Sarte is at the Mur’s summit (Jacob Whitehead/The Athletic)
Its position between Amstel Gold, the biggest race in the Netherlands, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the season’s fourth Monument — means it is guaranteed eyeballs, but its midweek slot makes it somewhat of an afterthought, a tune-up skipped by Tadej Pogacar and Remco Evenepoel this year in favour of rest and relaxation.
This year’s startlist, instead, was headlined by teenager Seixas, in the strange position of entering a one-day race as a favourite. That said, the list of recent men’s winners is highly esoteric, ranging from the likes of Pogacar, Julian Alaphilippe, and five-time winner Alejandro Valverde, all with a claim to be amongst the best riders of their own generation, to the likes of Marc Hirschi, Dylan Teuns and Stephen Williams.
The women’s race, by contrast, invariably sees the cream rise — Nicole Cooke, Marianne Vos, Tour victors Vollering and Katarzyna Niewiadoma, and the scarcely believable seven-time champion Anna van der Breggen, riding again in 2026 after several years away, including a temporary retirement..
What’s the 36-year-old’s secret to the Mur? “The climb just before it means you’re not fully recovered from that effort,” she said pre-race. “And the Mur itself is just too long to go into it without pacing. You have to think about how you want to approach it.“
Vollering agrees. “It’s not so much about tactics, but about having the legs. You have to dig really, really deep, and that can be a bit scary, because you don’t want to blow up. You will just go backwards, and that means that riders can change position so quickly in the last few hundred metres.”
Demi Vollering celebrates winning the 2026 Fleche Wallone (JOHN THYS / AFP via Getty Images)
There are certain agreed rules about how to win. Fought over thin and twisting roads, positioning is essential — it is exceptionally rare for any rider to win having entered the foot of the climb outside the top 10.
Typically, the winning rider will also avoid making the first serious attack — though Pogacar took a butcher’s knife to that sacred cow with his dominant victory last year — by ensuring they have something in the tank for the final few hundred metres.
So it was on Wednesday. In the women’s race, Vollering did everything by the book — placing herself in the front three, riding a high tempo, at her pace, to distance the more explosive riders — and earning a gap of some 20 metres by three-quarters of the way up the Mur, a relative eternity on these slopes.
Vollering had, however, hit the ragged edge by the closing metres, with Puck Pieterse closing to her back wheel with an inspired final sprint, the 23-year-old coming within a few pedal-strokes of defending her title.
“She scared me for sure,” Vollering said. “I saw her in the pedals (behind me) and was like: ‘Oh my god.’”
Seixas, meanwhile, crossed the line alone. His is a preternatural talent still exploring its own boundaries — this was the most significant win of his career so far, becoming, at 19 years and 210 days, the youngest winner of Flèche Wallonne in history, pushing Philemon De Meersman and Eddy Merckx into second and third respectively.
No one in the men’s peloton could match Seixas’ pace on Wednesday (Bernard PAPON / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)
His ride was remarkable in its maturity. Rather than exploding the bunch too early, and risking his own legs in the process, Seixas visibly rode to his pace, save for three considered accelerations — at the foot of the climb, just after the steepest bend of 26 per cent, and finally, with everything he had, with 300m to go to the line. Nobody got near his wheel.
“I admit that, honestly, we had a very different plan this morning,” Seixas said. “But I did it by feeling.”
And so here’s one more omen. Twelve years ago, Pauline Ferrand-Prevot became the youngest woman to win Flèche Wallonne. Later, she became the first Frenchwoman to win the Tour de France.
Seixas has emulated the first part of her record. Next week, his Decathlon CMA-CGM team are expected to announce whether he will ride his first Tour de France. Seixas’ display on the Mur de Huy’s famous slopes is the latest evidence that he has the talent to complete the second half too — it is a mantle he wears remarkably lightly.
By the time the 19-year-old finishes speaking, it is virtually empty on the Mur, the climb hollowed out and emptied into the bars below. There are two separate sweeper crews, one for the barriers, one for the litter, a group in bucket hats finish their beers in the last of the evening sun, and at its base, a running club, the road theirs now, begin their own repetitions up the hill.
