Everyone's Freaking Out About Isaac Del Toro
Updates from the Tour Down Under, the top salaries in cycling, and why Law & Order fans are in prime position to watch the Tour de France.
Full disclosure: I don’t plan on writing much about sprint stages this season. They’re kind of monotonous until the climactic final kilometer, which plays out the same way visually and tactically almost every time. It’s just not as interesting to me.
So on Tuesday night (Wednesday afternoon Australia time), I was disappointed to see the peloton come over the final climb of Stage 2 of the Tour Down Under almost intact. Australian champion Luke Plapp had taken out a small lead, followed by Jhonatan Narvaez of Ecuador and Ineos Grenadiers. Plapp is a strong time trialist, and maybe he could’ve made a run for it, but Narvaez had just outsprinted everyone to take the pre-Tour crit race a few days earlier, and Plapp was instructed by his team not to work with Narvaez. He sat up, the pair was swallowed up by the peloton, and that seemed to be that. (The next day, Plapp hit the deck and came away with a horrendous toro-long case of road rash, photo here for you sickos who want to see.)
Once the peloton comes together to prepare for a sprint, the only way to spoil the party is an ambush attack just as the leadout trains are getting organized, a kilometer or two out from the finish line.
Over any meaningful distance on flat ground, a group of riders will go faster than a sole escapee. I remember Benoît Cosnefroy trying to attack the peloton from like 10 kilometers out on a flat Tour de France stage in 2020, and NBC color commentator Christian Vande Velde dismissing the effort as “silly.”
But from closer range, the multi-rider leadout trains that set up the final effort take time to assemble. Riders have to jockey for position, assemble in formation, and pick their racing lines. All that takes time and concentration, so if a rider can sneak off the front while the sprint trains are getting organized, he can pull out a lead of a few dozen meters before anyone realizes what’s going on.
A proper sprint train gets up to speed in the last kilometer of the race, and the sprinters only really go all-out for 10 or 15 seconds—200 meters, maybe 300. But a rider who kicks off a sprint, puts his head down, and pedals like hell can sometimes hold off the peloton.
That’s still a low-percentage play. In order to win, an escapee needs favorable parcours—it helps to have a few corners in the way, which a solo rider can navigate quickly while the peloton has to stretch out and re-form. More than that, he needs the peloton to ease off the pace behind him. Chasing down an escapee takes energy, and no team that’s worth a damn is going to weaken itself for the final sprint by dragging its opponents into prime position. (This is basically how Jasper Stuyven won Milan-San Remo in 2021.)
But it’s doable, in the right conditions. The young American rider Quinn Simmons is good at it. At last year’s Vuelta a San Juan, he bum-rushed the sprint teams not on twisty roads with blind bends, but on a wide-open autodrome, and still held them off to win.
And once Plapp was caught, about four kilometers out, it looked like Simmons would do it again. He cranked off the front of the peloton, Frenchman Bastien Tronchon on his wheel, and pulled out a gap. They stayed away for a couple kilometers, but it was not to be the winning move.
When a breakaway is finally caught, everyone tends to relax for a moment. It’s understandable—the peloton has solved one phase of the race, and pauses before moving onto the next. But just as the peloton was about to catch Simmons and Tronchon, the road narrowed and kinked to the right, and Isaac del Toro struck.
Del Toro carried speed into the corner and accelerated out of it, passed Simmons and Tronchon, and accelerated again out of the reciprocal left-hand bend. At that point, there was only one kilometer and one steep left-hand turn left in the race, and the sprint teams—already having navigated a climb and two breakaways in the previous 20 minutes—paused just for a moment.
And del Toro was gone. His initial gap was just enough, and the charging peloton came a bike length or two short of catching him.
Why is this important? After all, this was a bit of a fluky win on a single stage of a not-particularly-prestigious race, with a not-particularly-strong field.
First, del Toro is from Mexico, which is a virtual nonentity in road cycling. I don’t know why. It’s got mountains, it’s got roads, it’s got a huge population. The U.S. is a big cycling country, Colombia is a big cycling country, Ecuador, Venezuela and Canada throw out the occasional notable rider. They’re not killing everyone else in COCACAF at soccer anymore, so it’s not that.
Anyway, this relatively minor stage win is (near as I can tell—the UCI tinkers with race rankings from time to time) the first World Tour win for a Mexican rider since 2002. There hasn’t really been a star Mexican cyclist since Raúl Alcalá in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It’s a huge win for a rider from one of the most underserved cycling markets out there.
Second, people think del Toro has the goods. This attack was maybe a little lucky, but it was perfectly timed and exquisitely executed. It took not only power, but savvy and enormous courage. It was a veteran move from a rider who only turned 20 two months ago, in only the third race day of his professional career.
And what’s not on that highlight clip is what happened just after the last climb: After Plapp and Narvaez made their move, UAE Team Emirates sent del Toro to the front of the peloton to try to bridge one of their other young riders, 22-year-old Finn Fisher-Black, to the leading duo. Fisher-Black, a New Zealander, is the closest thing UAE has to a homegrown favorite in the race, and del Toro put in a couple big efforts in an (unsuccessful) attempt to put him in the break. And he still had enough left in the tank just minutes later to stay clear of the chasing sprinters.
Del Toro didn’t come out of nowhere; last summer, he won the Tour de l’Avenir—the junior Tour de France. Not only that, he won the stage on the Col de la Loze, which is a big fuck-off mountain in the Alps, one of the highest the Tour de France visits, with a finish line at about 2,300 meters. He also won the mountains and points classifications.
So when UAE signed del Toro and put him in the World Tour peloton, it was a big deal, because the last 20-year-old Tour de l’Avenir champion to sign with UAE was Tadej Pogačar.