Isaac del Toro won GP Montréal 2026 on the identical Mont Royal circuit that hosts the actual Worlds road race in five days, outsprinting 19-year-old Paul Seixas after the pair broke clear together on the 16th and final ascent of Camillien-Houde. Here’s the part that matters more than the result itself: four kilometers from the line, del Toro was on the brink of cracking, barely holding Seixas’s wheel up the steepest pitches of Avenue Pagnuelo. He won anyway. That gap — between nearly getting dropped and crossing the line first — is worth more to your own training than anything about who’s favored on September 27, though the favorites picture did shift again, two days after we called Montreal wide open with Pogačar gone and with Remco Evenepoel, fresh off his own GP Québec win, finishing 5th here. If you wanted one afternoon that proves everything our own course guide said about this climb, this was it.

Quick Verdict: GP Montréal 2026 Results

Detail	Info
Winner	Isaac del Toro (UAE Team Emirates-XRG), surging past Paul Seixas 200m from the line
Where it broke open	The 16th and final ascent of Camillien-Houde, the same climb the Worlds road race hits 12 times
The near-crack	Del Toro was on the brink of cracking holding Seixas’s wheel up the steep pitches of Avenue Pagnuelo, 4km from the finish
Podium	1. Del Toro, 2. Seixas (19), 3. Brandon McNulty — the defending champion and del Toro’s own teammate
Evenepoel’s day	Fresh off his Sept 11 GP Québec win, spent Montréal’s decisive stretch more than 40 seconds behind the winning move and salvaged 5th
UAE’s streak	Five straight GP Montréal wins: Pogačar (2022, 2024), Yates (2023), McNulty (2025), del Toro (2026)
Why it matters	Same circuit, same climb, same city as the Sept 20-27 Worlds course — the closest real dress rehearsal there is

The lesson: Even the rider who won nearly didn’t. Sixteen trips up a 2.3km climb got to del Toro on the last one, exactly the way our Worlds course guide said a repeated punchy climb eventually gets to everyone.

What Actually Happened on Camillien-Houde

GP Montréal is raced over a shorter circuit than the Worlds course, which means more laps of the same climb packed into one afternoon — 16 ascents of Camillien-Houde by the time the race decided itself, four more than the elite men will face at Worlds. Del Toro and Seixas went clear together on that 16th and final trip up, distancing the rest of the favorites group including McNulty and a chasing Evenepoel. That part read like a script: strongest two riders escape on the last climb, race for it to the line.

What didn’t read like a script was the four kilometers in between. According to Cyclingnews’s race report, del Toro was on the brink of cracking as he clung to Seixas’s wheel through the steepest pitches of Avenue Pagnuelo — not attacking, not controlling, just hanging on. A 22-year-old who’d already won a Giro d’Italia stage and finished on a Grand Tour podium was, by every account of that stretch, closer to getting dropped than to winning. Then, 200 meters from the line, he caught Seixas off guard with a surge that decided the race. Domestique Cycling’s report has the same shape: a rider who looked beaten with minutes to go, finding one more effort nobody watching expected.

Del Toro was blunt about it afterward. He’d had a rough day two days earlier at GP Québec as well, and in his own words: sometimes you’re human, not every day is going to be your best one. He won anyway. That combination — an honest admission of feeling bad, on top of a result that says otherwise — is the whole story of this race.

The Exact Thing Our Worlds Course Guide Warned About, Live

We wrote a guide to this circuit a week before this race happened, and one line from it applies almost too well here: “the danger lap usually isn’t the first, when adrenaline masks effort, or the last, when you know it’s almost over. It’s somewhere in the middle.” Del Toro’s near-crack complicates that a little, and in an instructive way — it happened on the last climb, the one where you’d expect the finish line itself to carry a rider home. It didn’t. Sixteen reps of accumulated fatigue don’t care that you can see the banner. If anything, del Toro’s near-miss is the harder version of the lesson: even when you know it’s almost over, “almost over” can still be the moment you crack, because the climb doesn’t know your legs are counting down.

That’s worth sitting with if you’re training for any event built around repeated short efforts — a crit with a hilly finishing circuit, a gran fondo with a lumpy back half, a local series that hits the same rise six or eight times. The temptation is to believe the last one is safe because you can smell the finish. Del Toro’s afternoon says the last one is exactly when 16 laps of accumulated cost finally sends the bill.

The Favorites Picture, Briefly

None of that changes the lesson above, but it’s worth a quick note since we spent all of yesterday on this exact question. Evenepoel — the rider we’d flagged as best equipped to make a race-winning move stick on a demanding circuit after his September 11 GP Québec win — spent Montréal’s decisive stretch more than 40 seconds behind the front and still salvaged 5th, a real recovery ride on tired legs after back-to-back one-day races, just not the coronation his last result implied. Brandon McNulty, del Toro’s own UAE Team Emirates-XRG teammate and the rider defending last year’s Montréal title, finished close enough behind the winning move for 3rd — a reminder that UAE sent at least two cards to this race, not one.

A single result two weeks out doesn’t settle anything, different lap count and weather at the actual Worlds guarantee that much. But it’s the closest real proxy available, and it moved the picture:

	Before GP Montréal	After GP Montréal
Del Toro	Punchy contender, unproven on this exact circuit	Confirmed winner, plus proof he can find something after nearly cracking
Evenepoel	Rider best placed to fill the void left by Pogačar	Genuine contender, but 40+ seconds off the winning move here
McNulty	Defending champion, not previewed as a factor	Live UAE card, 3rd, arguably as dangerous as his own teammate
Seixas, 19	Not part of the conversation	Matched del Toro up the hardest climb of the day, lost only the sprint

Van Aert, Van der Poel, and Pidcock weren’t part of this particular script, which says nothing about their form and everything about how incomplete any pre-Worlds list still is.

The Repeatability Problem, Confirmed

The number that mattered here wasn’t a gradient or a wattage figure. It was 16 — the count of times the field went up Camillien-Houde before the race decided itself, four more reps than the elite men will face at Worlds and double what the elite women will see. Our course guide called this climb “a test of repeatability, not power,” and a field that included two Grand Tour podium finishers, a defending Montreal champion, and a rider fresh off a GP Québec win still produced a winner who nearly got dropped on the last of those reps. That’s not a fluke of one bad race. It’s the exact mechanism a 12-to-16-lap circuit is built to expose, and it did its job on schedule.

Training the Del Toro Near-Crack

You can’t recreate “16 laps of fatigue, then a near-crack with the finish in sight” on a trainer in any literal sense. But you can train the specific skill del Toro needed on Avenue Pagnuelo: producing one hard, decisive effort after your legs have already told you they’re close to done.

Get genuinely tired first, not pretend-tired — 45-60 minutes of steady tempo (75-80% FTP, RPE 6/10) does it, or the back half of a long group ride if a trainer session that long sounds miserable. Once you’re actually there, without stopping to recover, move straight into 6-8 reps of 4 minutes at 85-90% FTP (RPE 7/10), with only 2 minutes of easy spinning between each — under-recovering on purpose, because that’s the state del Toro was racing in by lap 16. On the last rep, don’t ease off at the four-minute mark. Push straight into one 45-second effort at 115-125% FTP instead: the surge, done on legs that already feel finished rather than fresh ones.

What you’re measuring isn’t average power for the ride. It’s how much of that final 45 seconds you actually hold versus how much fades in the last 15. A rider who can still find something on legs that have been under-recovering for the better part of an hour is training the exact capacity del Toro used 200 meters from the line. If your FTP is more than six or eight weeks old, retest before trusting any of these numbers — this session punishes a stale one, since the point is knowing what you actually have left, not what you wish you had left. And if the near-crack feeling itself catches you off guard mid-effort, that’s a trainable response, not just a fitness gap.

The Bottom Line

The number that actually matters from GP Montréal 2026 isn’t a name on a start list. It’s four — the kilometers where the strongest rider in the race was closer to getting dropped than to winning, and won anyway. Sixteen trips up a 2.3km climb will find the gap in anyone’s legs eventually, even a Grand Tour stage winner’s, even on the lap where the finish line is close enough to see. That’s the lesson worth carrying into your own repeated-climb events, well before it’s worth carrying into a Worlds prediction. The favorites conversation did move in the last 48 hours — less settled than it looked with Pogačar still entered, less settled than it looked after Québec too — but that’s a two-week story that’ll keep changing before September 27. What del Toro proved on Avenue Pagnuelo won’t: the climb doesn’t know your legs are counting down, and finding something anyway on the lap that’s supposed to be safe is a trainable skill, not just a gift some riders have.

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Race result, breakaway details, and Del Toro’s brink-of-cracking moment on Avenue Pagnuelo from Cyclingnews and Domestique Cycling. Del Toro’s post-race comments on feeling unwell from Domestique Cycling’s follow-up report. Full classification from ProCyclingStats. Evenepoel’s GP Québec win date from Domestique Cycling. Training targets are estimates based on power-based training principles. Adjust for your own tested FTP and conditions.