After Vuelta criticism, UAE and Pogacar deliver cycling masterclass in Montréal: world champion lets McNulty take the win
CyclingMonday, 15 September 2025 at 12:04
Brandon McNulty has won the GP Montréal, thanks to Tadej Pogacar. The world champion executed a tactical masterpiece with UAE Team Emirates-XRG, delivering a performance we haven’t seen from the team very often. The entire squad controlled the race, set the pace, and ultimately launched Pogacar into a solo move. But the team leader let McNulty come back and take the win in Canada.
After the surprising outcome of Friday’s GP Québec, where Julian Alaphilippe won from an early breakaway, everyone knew that UAE Emirates-XRG would come to Montréal with a point to prove. Pogacar had already won this tougher race of the Canadian duo in both 2022 and 2024, and on Sunday, he had his team take full control of the race.
The course was 209.1 kilometers long, featuring seventeen local laps with the Côte Camillien-Houde (2.3 km at 6.3% average) on each one. A breakaway of no less than seven riders formed early on in the race. And after what happened in Québec, it was worth watching closely to see how much room they'd be given.
Not much, as it turned out.
Jørgen Nordhagen (Visma–Lease a Bike), Pascal Eenkhoorn (Soudal–Quick-Step), Andrew August, Artem Shmidt (both INEOS Grenadiers), Victor Lafay (Decathlon AG2R), Frank van den Broek (Picnic PostNL), and Embret Svestad-Bardseng (Arkéa) were allowed a maximum gap of two minutes. But halfway through the race, only about 30 seconds of that was left.
Continue reading below the video!
Strong breakaway, but UAE gives them no room
Time for a new group of riders trying to bridge across. Nine riders made it up to the break: Mauro Schmid (Jayco AlUla), Laurence Pithie, Jan Tratnik (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe), Gianni Vermeersch (Alpecin-Deceuninck), Lewis Askey (Groupama-FDJ), Alex Baudin, Harry Sweeny (EF Education-EasyPost), Fredrik Dversnes (Uno-X), and Marius Mayrhofer (Tudor) joined in.
After Eenkhoorn had to drop out of the break due to a crash, the leaders had to dig deep. UAE wasn’t wasting any time, as they were going full gas from early on in the race, first with Nils Politt and then Tim Wellens. Big names like Wout van Aert (Visma) were dropped from the peloton, which gave the break no more than 30 seconds, with five laps to go.
Five more laps of nearly 13 kilometers each remained, roughly 60 km total, and UAE just kept pushing, lap after lap. Québec winner Alaphilippe got dropped, along with many others. The peloton had been reduced to just 20 riders, chasing a breakaway group that now only consisted of Schmid, August, Tratnik, Baudin, Svestad-Bardseng, Van den Broek, and Dversnes.
Continue reading below the video.
UAE Emirates-XRG ups the pace, McNulty launches Pogacar
Once the break was caught with three laps to go, everyone was waiting for the big UAE move. It came with 37 kilometers left. After work from Pavel Sivakov, Brandon McNulty attacked to launch Pogacar. Quinn Simmons (Lidl-Trek) and Louis Barré (Intermarché-Wanty) joined the move. The four pressed on full gas.
McNulty pulled like a jet engine at the front, and the group, including Pogacar, opened a 30-second gap on the men in pursuit. UAE had Sivakov, Jhonatan Narváez, and Adam Yates in that chasing group too, expertly shutting down any attempts to bridge across. A masterclass from UAE, especially given how much criticism they received in the Vuelta a España around João Almeida’s support.
With 23 kilometers to go, Pogacar made his move, and no one could follow suit. The chase group was long gone, and the rainbow jersey dropped Simmons and Barré too. And McNulty? He waited, then saw his moment, dropped the two non-UAE riders. With 15 kilometers left, UAE was riding in first and second place in the race.
Continue reading below the video.
Pogacar waits for McNulty, but who will win in Montréal?
The big question: would Pogacar keep going? Or let McNulty come back? The gap was just 15 seconds, with Simmons and Barré already over 30 seconds back. The answer came quickly: Pogacar eased up, looked back a few times, and allowed McNulty to rejoin. The only chaser still hanging on was Simmons, sitting about 30 seconds behind with 10 kilometers to go.
And so the only question left was - would Pogacar give away the win? Or did he want to claim it himself?
Of course, it was the former. Pogacar has already won so much, including twice in Montréal. And so the two UAE riders crossed the finish line together, with McNulty just a bit ahead.
Results GP Montréal 2025
Results powered by FirstCycling.com
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Latest Comments
- Roger Vlaeminck says Mads is not a good rider? Where is the headline saying you don't even have to be a good rider to win the World Road Championship says Roger Vlaeminck, who never won it!!? Perhaps his aging mind needs to think about what the heck he's saying.packfiller7103-09-2025
- Wow, there is so much criticism of the UAE XRG riders. Why so much criticism is being leveled solely at the riders is baffling. The UAE XRG management deserves a good amount of the criticism aimed at the team, as a whole. They have not managed the talent they have at all. They failed miserably to properly handle young Isaac del Toro on that penultimate day of the Giro. And they have not handled Juan Ayuso well either. If they didn't have Tadej Pogacar in their roster, we might not be talking about them as winners, at all. So many think that Ayuso has shown that he is not a "team" player at all. Does anybody think that he might be thinking about his own future at this point? That he might want to feel like the team has his back, when they load the pressure onto him? And Joao is not a team leader. That burden might be laid on him by the management, but they need to properly support that assignment, not make it a contentious situation, within the team. And then how management has conducted themselves throughout this parting of ways between themselves and Ayuso has been totally indiscreet. And yet people want to pile onto Ayuso when he tells the truth about the manner that this is all soap opera is developing. He wants out. He shouldn't be getting so much negative criticism for that. It's a situation that has soured. Yes he has a contract, but he is not the first, nor will he be the last that wants to get out of a relationship that just isn't working anymore. And DeCauwer seems to have very vague reasons for criticizing Almeida. He does realize that Jonas is the second best Grand Tour rider of this current generation, so it should be no shame that Joao is behind him in the standings. Riders are giving their all in an extremely difficult sport that stretches them, often beyond their limits. Now many are wanting to send them to Behavioral School as well? The criticism ought to mellow out, or it ought to simply be ignored, as nothing more than blah, blah, blah, not worth the headlines it gets
reemmo002-09-2025 - In 5yrs, Pogi will be a top Twitch streamer living on baked goods while Urska is still racing.Veganpotter11-08-2025
- All they learned is that at the end of a 3 week race, Wout can beat him on a slightly bumpy stage. Obviously, this is very much thanks to Wout not racing for GC every day. This doesn't teach them a thing for Jonas beating Pogi. Not saying Jonas will never beat him again. But this absolutely won't have anything to do with it if he does beat him.Veganpotter28-07-2025
- Well, he eventually Pogacar pays the price for his insane spring campaign which was really crazyRosenkohl196125-07-2025
- Maybe I was a bit disrespectful to Heiden. What he did was unique and exceptional but he wasn't the only one who combined those distances, nowadays it is just not possible and nobody competes in both distances. The same is true for cycling with for example the combination of Roubaix and de Tour de France. In Merckx era there were more riders who managed a top10 in both races than currently.Joostmehrtens19-06-2025
- Two old men shouting at pigeons in the park…JonS16-06-2025
- Out of touch old men hankering after their youth through rose tinted spectacles, their arrogance almost outshines their irrelevance. Turn the volume down, this modern stuff just isn't music like we used to sing...johnny20whales16-06-2025
- In talking speed skating, the days when Heiden did that, nobody else did that. And Eddy couldn't do the equivalent of the bike. His 200 on the velodrome was good, but not world competitive for gold. Heiden was in his own world on the ice, moreso than Eddy if we pretend Eric didn't have a very short career on the ice.Veganpotter16-06-2025
- They wouldn't have dropped HIM so easily.... the GOAT. They would have dropped the rest from that era easily thoughVeganpotter16-06-2025
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