The wall at the end of Wallonia
The Grand Prix de Wallonie is a race with one address: 197 km of Walloon hills from Seraing that exist mainly to deliver the peloton, together and furious, to the foot of the Citadelle de Namur — 3 km at 4%, cobbles included, rising through the fortress walls above the Meuse. The 2026 edition ran the classic script. A big, constantly reshuffling break — Bais, De Vries, Maas, Huck, later Verona, Oliveira, Abrahamsen, Gualdi and Le Berre — was allowed its afternoon and then reeled to within 18 seconds by 24 km to go, caught soon after. Tim Wellens went solo with 12 km left, less to win than to hurt people, and it worked: the peloton thinned to fifty, with Biniam Girmay, Jake Stewart and Lewis Askey among those who wouldn’t see the front of the race again.
The Citadelle does its sorting
Onto the climb, and the attacks came in order of impatience: Romain Grégoire under two kilometres out, Jenno Berckmoes clinging on until 1.6, Paul Lapeira countering as the fortress switchbacks stacked up. All of it — every dig, every counter — was swallowed inside the final 400 metres, which meant the oldest finish in Belgian cycling: a reduced-group uphill sprint on tired legs and cobbles. Grégoire launched first. For a hundred metres it was his race. Then a 20-year-old came off his wheel with the kind of acceleration that ends arguments, and Aubin Sparfel crossed the line first on the Citadelle, a super-close finish that wasn’t actually close by the time it mattered.
Who is Aubin Sparfel
French, 20, Decathlon CMA CGM, and until today a name mostly known to people who follow development racing and winter mud — the kind of rider whose results sheet reads like a promise. This is the biggest senior win of his career, taken not in a soft field but over Grégoire, Wellens, Lapeira and a start list stacked with Worlds-bound riders using Namur as a sharpener. He called it part of a “rapid rise,” which is the polite way of saying it out loud. Decathlon’s youth project — Seixas dueling Del Toro in Montréal on Sunday, Bisiaux and Chamberlain in the Vuelta’s Monaco top ten, now Sparfel on the Citadelle — is starting to look less like a project and more like a warning.
In the grupetto
Spare a thought for Romain Grégoire, who in the space of a week has led out Løland’s win in Pescara by accident and Sparfel’s in Namur by necessity — the strongest rider of the autumn’s second tier, collecting seconds while the wins go to the wheels he pulls. The autobus also salutes the all-day break, Wellens for racing like it was April, and every heavy-legged Vuelta finisher who rolled up the Citadelle at conversation pace, three weeks of Spain still in their legs and the Worlds still to come.
Moral of the story
Grégoire attacked at two kilometres, got caught, and sprinted anyway; Sparfel did nothing all the way up the fortress except choose the right wheel and the right moment. The grupetto’s moral: on a summit finish everyone knows is coming, the climb doesn’t reward the rider who makes the race hard — it rewards the one the hard race couldn’t touch. Twenty years old, one Citadelle, zero respect for seniority. The French keep making these. Nobody else is allowed to complain; they were all young once too.
