The 2026 World Championships road race started without its defending champion. After two rainbow jerseys in a row from Tadej Pogačar — and the kind of dominance that turns every other team's plan into "hope he has a bad day" — the men's race in Montréal was suddenly open. That's what this episode is about: the course, the climbs that could decide it, and who was best placed to take advantage.
A quick note before we get into it. We recorded this before the race. The race has now been run, and I've added what happened at the bottom of this page so you can hold the preview up against the result.
Why he wasn't there
Pogačar crashed out of the Vuelta while he was leading it. The list was ugly: a collarbone fracture, a stable fracture of the C7 vertebra in his neck, a concussion. He had surgery in Barcelona at the end of August and on 5 September his team confirmed that was his season done. So the jersey he'd won in Zurich and Kigali went to Montréal without its owner.
The course
It's long. 273.4km, with 3,803 metres of climbing. The race started in Brossard on the south shore, came into the city over the Samuel-De Champlain Bridge, and then did 12 laps of a 13.4km circuit around Mount Royal. Each lap has 269 metres of climbing in it.
The headline climb is Voie Camillien-Houde: 2.3km at 6.2%. On its own that's not a monster. You've probably got a climb like it near home. The point is that you do it twelve times, and by the ninth or tenth time it's a completely different climb. Add in the steep pitches on Chemin de la Polytechnique and a finish on the rising false flat of Avenue du Parc, and you've got a circuit where the damage is cumulative. Nobody wins this race on lap three. Plenty of people lose it there.
If the roads look familiar, it's because most of this circuit has been used for the Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal since 2010, and Montréal hosted the Worlds once before, in 1974 — the first ever held outside Europe.
The contenders
Without Pogačar, there was no rider the whole field had to race around, and the previews spread their picks wide. Remco Evenepoel came in as the favourite for most people, fresh off another time trial title that week. Isaac del Toro had won the GP de Montréal on the same roads two weeks earlier. Then Van der Poel, Van Aert, Pidcock, Paul Seixas, and the Americans Quinn Simmons and Brandon McNulty, who'd been third behind Del Toro and Seixas at the GP.
The bigger question is what happens to a race when there's no one strong enough to control it. With Pogačar there, everyone knows the shape: his team rides, he goes, everyone else fights for the rest. Without him, you get a race where every team is waiting for someone else to do the work — and that's the kind of race where a well-timed move can get away and never come back.
What happened
It went exactly that way. With about 35km to go, a front group that included Van der Poel was brought back and around a dozen riders were left at the front. Matteo Jorgenson had a go, and then Brandon McNulty went — not on Camillien-Houde, where everyone was waiting for it, but on a flat section with roughly 32km left. He had over a minute with two laps to go. The chase never organised itself properly. By the final time up Camillien-Houde the gap was down to around ten seconds, and it held. McNulty won by 13 seconds from Michael Matthews and Van der Poel, with Simmons fourth and Del Toro fifth. First American elite men's road world champion since 1993.
"It's been an hour now and I still don't believe it," he said afterwards. He said the move was instinct, and that he went on the flat precisely because everyone expected attacks on the climbs.
There's a lesson in that for your Saturday group ride, too. Everyone saves themselves for the hill everyone knows about. The rider who goes somewhere else, commits, and paces it like a time trial often gets a gap that nobody wants to take responsibility for closing.
I've written up both races — McNulty's solo and Demi Vollering's first world title the day before — and what a club racer can take from each in how McNulty and Vollering won the Montréal Worlds. And if you want the preview of the women's race, it's here.
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