When we covered Brandon McNulty’s solo win on Monday, we quoted Tom Pidcock once — a line about Isaac del Toro “obviously working for McNulty in the end there” — and moved on to the pacing math. That undersold the story. A day later, Pidcock’s full comments to Cyclingnews had turned into a genuine controversy, and Michael Matthews — the silver medalist, not some also-ran with sour grapes — piled on with his own version of the same complaint in road.cc’s live coverage from September 28. Both riders are describing the same failure from different angles: a six-rider chase group with three medals on the line that never organized, because the loyalties inside it ran through trade teams and national teams instead of the shared interest of catching one American. That’s not a footnote. That’s the actual tactical story of Sunday’s race, and it’s a lesson every category 3 rider sandbagging a Sunday club chase should recognize immediately.

Quick Verdict: The Worlds Chase Controversy

Detail	Info
Story broke	September 28, 2026 — the day after McNulty’s win, across Cyclingnews, road.cc, and others
Who’s complaining	Tom Pidcock (7th) and Michael Matthews (silver), both on record
The trade-team claim	Isaac del Toro (Mexico) hesitated to pull because McNulty is his UAE Team Emirates-XRG trade teammate
The national-team claim	Matteo Jorgenson (USA) sat in the chase and marked wheels rather than working, protecting teammate McNulty up the road
Del Toro’s response	Says Mexico was the isolated team, not the sheltered one
The lesson	A chase group with divided loyalties doesn’t need a conspiracy to fail — it just needs everyone to have a better reason to sit than to pull

What Pidcock and Matthews Actually Said

Pidcock’s version, from that same Cyclingnews piece, is specific about why the chase couldn’t close the gap: “It was hard to make the difference, to get the gap with the wind the way it was, with the USA team and with Matteo, who was super strong once Brandon attacked, and obviously Isaac is on the same team as well.” Two separate riders, two separate reasons the group couldn’t commit — and Pidcock names both in the same breath.

Matthews went further in comments carried on road.cc’s live blog, and he wasn’t talking only about UAE. “There was a little bit of teamwork between certain riders, they were riding a little bit together,” he said. “If fewer teams had ridden together across national borders, then we would have caught him. It is what it is.” Read that last line twice. Matthews isn’t accusing one team of cheating. He’s saying the entire chase fractured along lines that had nothing to do with the six nations riding in it — Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Mexico, Australia, and the USA all had representation in that group, and it still didn’t work, because national colors weren’t the loyalty that mattered most to everyone in it.

The Trade-Team Mechanics: Del Toro’s Hesitation

Here’s the plain version. Del Toro races for Mexico at Worlds. But for 49 weeks a year, he’s a UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider — the same trade team as McNulty, the same team that’s won five straight editions of GP Montréal on this exact circuit. Del Toro is also the rider who beat McNulty’s own teammate lineage there three weeks earlier. When McNulty went clear with 32.4km to go, Del Toro was sitting in a chase group that included his trade team’s defending champion up the road. Pulling hard to bring back your own trade teammate, in front of your trade team’s sponsors, cameras, and management, is a genuinely awkward thing to commit to — even wearing different colors that day.

Del Toro didn’t sit up entirely. By most accounts he drove the chase repeatedly and got dropped more than once doing it. But “repeatedly drove the chase and still got accused of protecting his trade teammate” is exactly the kind of half-measure that a group with real trust would have called out in real time and worked around. Instead it became a storyline the day after.

The National-Team Mechanics: Jorgenson Marking Wheels

This is the part our original McNulty coverage skipped entirely, and it might matter more than the Del Toro angle. Matteo Jorgenson — American, riding for the USA national team, not UAE — was also in that chase group. Rather than working, he spent the finale doing something specific: marking wheels. Every time a dangerous rider attacked — Pidcock, Giulio Ciccone, Mathieu van der Poel — Jorgenson jumped onto that exact wheel and sat there, matching the effort without contributing to it.

Marking a wheel means following a specific rival’s move without ever coming through to pull — you spend just enough to stay attached to the danger, and nothing on closing the gap ahead. It’s legal, it’s common, and it’s devastating to a chase when the rider doing it has fresher legs than everyone else because he hasn’t spent a single watt on the front. Jorgenson had exactly that fresher-legs advantage, because his job all day had been positioning, not pulling.

The effect was structural, not accidental. Every time the group built momentum toward organizing, the rider best positioned to help lead that effort instead neutralized the next attack and sat back down. Jorgenson finished eighth — a result that undersells what he actually did, according to Cycling Up To Date’s report on the American team plan, which quotes him saying the goal was simply that “we just wanted an American to win this race.” He got exactly what he was riding for. It just wasn’t a medal with his own name on it.

Why Nobody Wanted to Spend the Legs

Strip out the trade-team drama and there’s a colder, simpler math problem underneath. Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Mexico were the nations nominally positioned to lead that chase — Evenepoel’s team, Van der Poel, Pidcock, Del Toro. Every one of them had a rider strong enough to organize a real rotation and close 32 seconds on a circuit they knew well. None of them fully did it.

Because here’s the problem none of the post-race quotes state outright but every rider in that group understood instantly: working hard to bring back one American only delivers a second American to the front of the sprint. Jorgenson was sitting right there, rested, marking the strongest wheels. Any rider who spent real matches closing the gap to McNulty was also, functionally, setting up a lead-out for whoever Jorgenson decided to follow into the finish. That’s not a trade-team problem or a national-team problem specifically — it’s what happens when a chase group has one team with two cards in it and everyone else has one. The incentive to work collapses the moment working helps your rival more than it helps you.

Del Toro’s Pushback — and the Case That He’s Not Even the Real Story

Del Toro didn’t take the criticism quietly. Responding to the trade-team accusations, he reframed the entire race: “And if all the peloton raced a little against us or used the fact we didn’t have the best team, I think we’re going to battle all the more next year,” he said, in comments reported by Domestique Cycling. His version isn’t “I helped my trade teammate.” It’s “Mexico was the isolated team, and everyone else used that against us.” He was blunt about the one thing he’d change: “Maybe I should have positioned myself better for that final sprint” — not a confession about loyalty, a note about positioning.

And there’s a real case he’s right to push back. Escape Collective’s own breakdown of the footage, published the same day as Pidcock’s comments, found that Del Toro actually did more work at the front than most of the group, got dropped multiple times chasing, and never once latched onto Pidcock’s wheel the systematic way Jorgenson did. Their conclusion was blunt: if Del Toro was really working for McNulty, he did a bad job of it. Jorgenson, riding for the same country as the winner rather than the same trade team, comes off as the rider who actually executed the tactic Pidcock was describing. The controversy landed on the wrong American.

What Does It Mean to “Sandbag” a Chase Group?

Sandbagging a chase means sitting in a group that’s trying to close a gap and deliberately withholding effort — matching wheels, covering moves, refusing to pull — because you benefit more from the group failing than from it succeeding. It doesn’t require a rules violation. It requires one rider (or team) to have a reason the rest of the group doesn’t share, and the legs to enforce it.

How Do You Spot a Chase Group That’s Sandbagging?

1. One rider keeps matching attacks but never initiates a pull on the flat or downhill sections. That’s the wheel-marking pattern — spending just enough to stay attached, never enough to help close the gap.
2. The group’s pace surges right after an attack, then drops immediately once it’s reeled in. Real organization holds a steady rotation. A sandbagged chase only moves when it’s forced to.
3. A rider from the same trade team or nation as the leader up the road is doing visibly less work than their engine suggests they’re capable of. Not proof on its own — riders have bad days — but worth watching for a pattern across multiple laps.
4. Nobody in the group calls out the freeloader. In an organized chase, riders police each other’s contributions out loud. Silence usually means everyone’s calculating their own angle instead.
5. The group is mathematically strong enough to close the gap and doesn’t. If six strong riders can’t pull back 30 seconds over several kilometers of flat road, legs aren’t the limiter. Incentive is.

A Drill for Punishing Wheel-Suckers in Your Own Chases

You can’t fix a Sunday club-race chase by lecturing people about incentives mid-race. But you can train yourself to be the rider who forces the issue instead of the rider who gets exploited by it — the one who either drags the group up to the break or attacks out of it solo rather than waiting on five people who all have a reason not to help.

The set: A simulated echelon rotation, three rounds, designed to punish anyone who doesn’t take an equal pull — including you, if you’re tempted to shortchange yours in training the way a marker does in a race.

Round	Duration	Your pull	Recovery (drafting effort)	Target
1	12 min	30 sec at 110-115% FTP	90 sec at 60-65% FTP	Full honest pulls, no shortcuts
2	12 min	20 sec at 115-120% FTP	100 sec at 60-65% FTP	Shorter, harder pulls — simulate a group losing patience
3	10 min	Solo effort at 95-100% FTP, no recovery	—	What it costs to close a gap alone when nobody else will pull

Warm up 15 minutes before round 1, spin easy 10 minutes after round 3. If you can do this with a group, rotate through a real paceline and have one rider deliberately skip pulls for a lap — everyone else will feel exactly what Pidcock and Matthews were describing, in miniature, on a Tuesday evening training loop instead of a world championship. Retest your FTP if it’s more than six to eight weeks old before trusting these numbers against your own legs.

What it tells you: Round 3 is the real lesson. If you can hold 95-100% FTP solo after two rounds of a group that wasn’t fully committing, you’ve built the exact skill McNulty used and the chase group lacked — the willingness to stop waiting for cooperation that isn’t coming and just go.

The Bottom Line

We flagged before this race started that a wide-open field without Pogačar would reward whoever decided the race was on before anyone else agreed. What actually happened was messier and more interesting: a chase group full of riders strong enough to catch one American got outnumbered by loyalties nobody could see from outside the peloton. Del Toro’s trade-team tie made for the louder headline, but the footage and Escape Collective’s own review suggest Matteo Jorgenson’s wheel-marking did more actual damage — a national-team teammate sitting fresh in the group while rivals traded pulls to bring back his roommate. Pidcock and Matthews are right that the group should have caught McNulty. They’re just not fully agreed on which American cost them the chase. For the rest of us racing club chases with none of this on the line, the lesson doesn’t need the conspiracy angle to hold up: a group with divided incentives doesn’t organize itself, and waiting for it to is how you lose to a rider who decided not to wait at all.

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Pidcock’s comments on the chase group and Del Toro from Cyclingnews. Matthews’s comments from road.cc’s live blog, September 28, 2026. Del Toro’s response from Domestique Cycling. Footage analysis of Del Toro’s and Jorgenson’s actual work rates from Escape Collective. Jorgenson’s quote and finishing position from Cycling Up To Date. Training targets are estimates based on power-based training principles. Adjust for your own tested FTP and conditions.