Van der Poel likes Del Toro's chances at the World Championship road race: 'Strong enough to do his own thing even without a team'

Mathieu van der Poel was clear when asked to identify the rider he considers the strongest favourite. "Remco Evenepoel is the top favourite," he said. "His record in championships says enough." But the Dutchman was equally blunt about the gap between Del Toro's talent and his team situation. "Seixas has a strong block with the French team, while someone like Del Toro is strong enough to do his own thing even without a team around him," Van der Poel told HLN.

It was far from a dismissal. Speaking in Montreal this week, Van der Poel pointed to Del Toro and Paul Seixas as the riders most capable of ripping the race apart. "If Paul Seixas and Isaac Del Toro go, there will not be many riders who can follow," he said, according to Domestique Cycling.

Del Toro's form this season justifies every word of that assessment. He won the Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal on September 13, beating Seixas, with Brandon McNulty third, Quinn Simmons fourth, Remco Evenepoel fifth and Tom Pidcock sixth. Most of the World Championships' 13.4-kilometer finishing circuit uses roads familiar from GP Montréal, giving Del Toro course knowledge that money cannot buy.

Earlier this summer, Del Toro became the first Mexican to finish on a Tour de France podium, finishing third overall as a Tour debutant while also winning the young rider classification. In our preview of the elite men's road race, he sits firmly in the top tier of favourites alongside Evenepoel and Seixas.

According to Escape Collective, Edgar Cadena, who finished 10th at the 2026 Lidl Deutschland Tour, is Del Toro's one solid teammate in the Mexican squad. The 26-year-old was born in Mexico City and currently races at Continental level. Before Del Toro became a star virtually overnight, Cadena was regarded as Mexico's number one cyclist, winning the national championship twice in a row in 2023 and 2024.

During the Deutschland Tour in August, where Del Toro won the overall classification, Cadena expressed frustration at a missed chance to collaborate with his compatriot. "It annoys me that I missed the chance to break away with Isaac," he told TOUR magazine. "That would certainly have been possible on the queen stage, but when he went, I was a bit too far back in the peloton and boxed in."

That dynamic captures the broader challenge for Sunday. At the World Championships, national teams replace trade squads, meaning Del Toro loses access to the UAE Team Emirates-XRG riders who normally protect him.

His usual trade teammate McNulty, for example, will race for the United States. Meanwhile, rival teams are stacked: Belgium has Evenepoel and Van Aert plus several tactical options; Great Britain has Pidcock alongside riders like Adam Yates; the United States brings eight riders, including McNulty, Simmons and Matteo Jorgenson. Mexico, by contrast, will send six runners for 273.7 kilometers and 3,803 meters of climbing.

Mexico's previous cycling world titles have all come on the track and in the women's category, meaning a victory in Montreal would make Del Toro the first Mexican man to become a cycling world champion and the first rider from his country to take the elite men's road race rainbow jersey.

Nancy Contreras was the first Mexican to win a cycling world title, taking gold in the 500m time trial at the 2001 Antwerp Track Worlds. More than two decades later, Yareli Acevedo claimed the world title in the points race in Santiago de Chile in 2025. But the road has always proved elusive.

Whether that means riding solo up Camillien-Houde in the final laps or relying on Cadena to stay close enough to make a difference, Del Toro will need to turn his individual brilliance into a race-winning tactic on Sunday.

Van der Poel, for one, believes he has the legs to do exactly that. As one analyst put it, "he hasn't got the burden of a team, or I guess he hasn't got the safety blanket of a team around them which some riders have." For Del Toro, that safety blanket has never existed. He will just have to keep doing what he has done all season: win on his own terms.