As an 18-year-old, Isaac del Toro crashed in Italy and broke his femur. The Mexican was thousands of miles from home, without a professional team, running out of money — and alone. He spent 16 days in hospital.
“I was pretty weak,” he tells The Athletic. “I don’t remember much about the first four days, but I realised that though there were people around, I was on my own. I had plenty of time to decide what to do.”
Del Toro gave serious thought to giving up and returning to his family in Ensenada, Baja California — worried the long-term injury would destroy his opportunity to secure a top-level WorldTour contract. But lying, immobile, in bed, only crystallised his decision. Del Toro was going to continue.
Three weeks after being released from hospital, Del Toro rode the descent where he crashed again. The aim was to rip off the band-aid, to apply disinfectant to any psychological scars.
“Honestly, that ride was one of the strongest feelings I’ve ever had in my life,” he says. “It’s my favourite climb here where I live in Europe, one now that I pass daily. And really, every time I pass, I feel something inside, something that forms the mentality that I want for everything, for my lifestyle, to make me a little bit more tough. It shows how quick life can pass — and how much I need to appreciate every moment.”
Less than four years on, Del Toro has the answers that his doubt demanded. The 22-year-old starred at last year’s Giro d’Italia, is the anointed successor to his mentor Tadej Pogačar, and sits third in the Tour de France, on debut, approaching its final four days.
From his hospital bed, Del Toro had dreamt of participating in races like this. But midway through his dream, and the day before speaking, on stage 15, Del Toro had crashed again — deliberately this time.
The reason? Rival Jonas Vingegaard had crashed in front of him, suffering a broken collarbone which would end his race — with the UAE Team Emirates rider instantaneously deciding to take the fall himself, rather than evading it, to avoid hitting yellow jersey Pogačar.
“I’ve had many experiences of this kind of situation in my career,” Del Toro says. “To avoid the crash myself, you need to push a little bit to the guy in front and then see. Most of the time, he (then) crashes, so I decided to let him pass and then just jump and see what happened with me, and hope for luck. In the end, I had it. I just tried to do something good for the team because it was a pretty risky situation.”
Holding his back and leg, grimacing, Del Toro remounted his bike — and immediately began the ascent of the hors categorie Plateau de Solaison. Generally, after a crash, the pain really starts to bite after 20 minutes. But this was not about survival. Forty-five minutes later, Del Toro was at the top of the climb — finishing in third, clear of almost all his podium rivals, and alongside Pogačar in the lead group.
Pogačar paces Del Toro up the final climb in last Sunday’s stage of the Tour de France (Anne-Christine POUJOULAT / AFP via Getty Images)
Over that climb, his UAE teammate appeared to pace his effort in order to keep Del Toro clear of 19-year-old third-place challenger Paul Seixas — it demonstrates the relationship the pair have. Del Toro fell to protect his leader; Pogačar paid back the favour. In a sport that sometimes favours the clinical over the human, especially when young riders with leadership potential joins a team, their friendship is unusual.
“Sometimes you just connect with some people,” says Del Toro. “In the beginning, when I talked to Tadej on the first day that I came into the team, I just tried to be as realistic as I could be. Sometimes, you need to say to people what you think, not what they want to listen to. And I think a lot of people think it’s different because he’s an idol.
“But I cannot be his fan even if I respect him and love him as a guy. I want to be realistic. If he does a bad joke, I will not laugh, and if he is a super nice guy, I will be right there with him. Be realistic, be friendly, sometimes don’t say what he wants to listen (to), and to be there for him. Most of the time, he is helping me, and it’s something I appreciate.”
That honesty goes both ways. Over the past two and a half weeks, on their first Grand Tour together, Pogačar has ribbed Del Toro about his slowness to get ready on the team bus. His younger teammate has a ritual — the order of his shoes and socks, nose-breathing exercises — everything has to be just so.
But the greatest mark of their relationship, forged over time spent together on altitude camps, came on stage two, when Pogačar gifted Del Toro a stage win on Montjuic, the pair having outkicked Vingegaard in the final metres. Watching the finish, it is possible to see the realisation dawn on Del Toro in real time.
“I first knew I would win this stage 125 metres from the end,” he says. “It was then that I knew what Tadej was doing. For me, it shows the world how he is as a person. Sometimes, the face can say more than a thousand words, and I believe this kind of moment is special.
“I don’t know if something like this has happened before, but for me, I won my very first opportunity in this race. This is thanks to him — he was the only one in that moment who was able to beat me.”
Back at the bus, Pogačar looked happier than he has all Tour, draping himself in the Mexican flag and directing Mexican fans in Barcelona in a chant of “¡Pogi, hermano, ya eres mexicano!” — Pogi, brother, you are Mexican!
“He has an even better personality than me for being Mexican,” Del Toro laughs. “He is crazy.”
Isaac del Toro interview
Jacob Whitehead
Del Toro is a long way from Mexico now. As a child, his mother expressed the desire for him to be active, to tire him out so he would sleep well at night. Football and taekwondo were both tried briefly, but Del Toro fell in love with cycling as a five-year-old — having been given a Spiderman bike.
“It was special, the best bike ever,” Del Toro remembers. “I never had so much fun, there was no brand, no nothing, it was just about enjoying life, jumping on the sidewalk or being in the park. That’s something now that’s always in my mind, even as a professional rider — to really enjoy it.”
Pogačar congratulates Del Toro after stage two of the 2026 Tour de France (Stephanie Lecocq / AFP via Getty Images)
He was deeply influenced by older brother Angel. “When you are a kid, you just want to be better than someone. When you have your brother doing the same thing, you want to be better.” Pogačar was exactly the same — growing up chasing his own older brother Milen on unicycles.
“As a family, and we always say this, we have no doubts, he was the better guy between us,” Del Toro says. “Doing the same things at the same age, he was just way better, so I always needed to push myself and work a little bit harder to be at the same point. That taught me that doing the job well could mean you realise and achieve things.”
Though Del Toro progressed in Mexico, winning local junior races, he quickly found himself stymied by the lack of opportunities for young riders. The country did not have a national cycling federation until last year — and though there were some options over the nearby border to the United States, Del Toro knew that his best chance of going professional would be to move to Europe.
As a young teen, he trawled Facebook for opportunities, sending out messages for any option that looked promising. After hearing about a trial session with Mexican development team Monex, which included accommodation and training in Europe, he begged his mother to take him to the session in Guanajuato, almost 2000km away.
“This kid is driving me crazy,” she said at the time. “Now he wants to go on a plane to another city, just for a test, for a small club team.” To test Del Toro’s commitment, she made him do chores, finish all his homework, tidy his room, to prove how much he wanted it. Del Toro passed both his mother’s and Monex’s trials.
As a 14-year-old, he found himself living in San Marino with a group of eight other cyclists, travelling across the continent for races, buying discounted equipment where he could, and finding his own gels in supermarkets. Experiences in the mud and snow of Belgian cyclocross developed his toughness — but being in the bunch took development.
“It was a completely different sport to what I was used to,” says Del Toro. “I raced sometimes in America, but not at this level, and I know it sounds simple, but it’s not that simple when you’re with another 80 or 100 riders.
“I was frustrated because, in the bunch, it’s difficult to win a lot of races. For me, it was easier in cyclocross and mountain bike where you were on your own, alone. So for me, it was even more special to win in this discipline.”
A 17-year-old Del Toro in the Men’s Junior ITT held in Belgium in September 2021 (Luc Claessen/Getty Images)
Even without exceptional results, UAE Team Emirates’ sports manager Joxean Fernández, known as Matxin, had spotted his potential — based mostly on Del Toro’s bravery.
“My first focus with Isaac was his surname,” Matxin tells The Athletic. “It’s special, it’s not normal in the results to have one Mexican guy fighting in the bunch in Belgium. It told me this guy had the balls.”
The pair stayed in contact after Del Toro recovered from his femur injury — speaking via phone call for three hours after the young rider made contact asking for advice. Del Toro, then 19, was targeting the 2023 Tour de l’Avenir — the junior version of the Tour de France — believing it was his “last bullet” to stay in Europe.
“In this new (era of) cycling I tried to learn as much as I could about how it worked, when guys started coming — Tadej, Jonas, Remco. You start to realise that everyone was finding a new superstar kid or whatever, and you realise that you can get old quick.
“And if you’re from another continent, it’s kind of different, because they’re not from Europe, they can’t get used to it. And each team in the WorldTour is at such a high level that they can’t risk giving up one place and that rider not being good enough, so for me, it was the key point in my career.”
Compared to the Europeans in the race, almost all of whom were signed to a WorldTour team, Del Toro was disadvantaged as an unattached rider. Matxin gave him advice: to attack on the shallower gradients, rather than the steeper sections. It worked to perfection. Del Toro took all four jerseys as he won the Tour de l’Avenir on its final stage.
“I’d never won a stage in Europe before,” he says. “I rode for 13 months after my crash and broken femur to win just a single stage. In the end, I didn’t win until (the final stage of) Col de la Loze. Sometimes, it’s even better when you want something and have to figure it out. If it didn’t work, honestly, I probably wouldn’t be here today.”
Del Toro pictured riding in the 2025 edition of Strade Bianche (Marco BERTORELLO / AFP via Getty Images)
Suddenly, a year on from that hospital bed, Del Toro had offers from almost every WorldTour team. Riders from other teams were requisitioned to call him; some telling him that they expected him to be their future leader.
“I don’t want to say names, but it was crazy to have my family sitting with me on WhatsApp and then the best riders in the world being there,” he says. “They weren’t trying to convince me, but more to explain how everything worked, what the situation of their team was — even if they wanted me there, they wanted to be neutral and give me the best option.
“In the end, I don’t think I made a mistake in my decision (to join Matxin at UAE). I took a lot of time in this, two months to decide. Maybe people will believe that or not, but it’s time that I took myself, without an agent at that point, and I tried to be smart.”
Del Toro’s impact at the team was near instantaneous. He rode the 2024 Vuelta a Espana, his first Grand Tour, helping Juan Ayuso, before being tasked with supporting the Spaniard and Adam Yates at the Giro just over six months later. After a superb second place to Wout Van Aert on stage nine, a mini-version of Strade Bianche leading into Siena, it was clear that the young Mexican was UAE’s leader.
That performance earned him the leader’s pink jersey, in which he won the mountainous stage 17, wearing the maglia rosa until the penultimate stage — where Yates’ brother Simon ambushed Del Toro, who was preoccupied watching second-placed Carapaz. At the finish line, Del Toro was devastated but calm — it had been the Grand Tour of his dreams.
“In order to be a great winner, you need to be a great loser,” he said post-race. “I think I’m a good loser. I congratulate Simon and Visma. Now I know that I can win a Grand Tour.”
Del Toro clad in the Giro’s pink iconic jersey during last year’s race (Luca Bettini / AFP) (Photo by LUCA BETTINI/AFP via Getty Images)
That focus has always been part of Del Toro’s make-up. En route to winning the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes last month (the renamed Criterium du Dauphine), one of the sport’s most prestigious one-day races, a viral clip showed him smiling on Seixas’ wheel, which was taken as a sign of his strength.
The true story is that he was grinning at his best friend, Toño Escarcega, a fellow Mexican and former teammate in Europe, who had surprised him by watching from the mountain.
“As a person, he’s always been serious,” Escarcega tells The Athletic. “Always serious in what he needs to do. Sometimes we (their teammates) would go to the beach or we’d go out to eat, but he came with us very few times. He preferred to rest, eat at home, or watch a film.”
Others close to him speak of Del Toro’s obsession with watching old bike races; stages from recent Grand Tours from which he feels that he can learn. Del Toro agrees with his friends’ assessments.
“For me, I was always the logical one, not the funny guy in the social circle,” he says. “I can be social, but not the one that makes lots of jokes. My family, they taught me how to approach these opportunities, to be prepared. When you take the opportunities, you stay at home and you’re prepared, sometimes (achievements) look like it’s luck, like it’s easy, but it was actually because we worked so hard before. I learned this from my family, they taught me this, every single one of them, when I was young.”
One of his only escapes is Lego — having bought a huge replica of Star Wars’ Death Star, which he intends to build when he returns to San Marino from the Tour.
“I spend a long time doing it,” he says. “I just put headphones on and will build it for three hours. I don’t have many things I do, but it’s something I enjoy so much.”
As a child, his mother had to ration the Lego sets she had bought him for birthdays, because he would build them instantly. When she asked how he could do it without instructions, he replied: “I don’t know. I just do it.”
That precociousness is on display at this Tour. He is here to help Pogačar, but many think he will be the next new name to win the yellow jersey. His battle for third with fellow youngster, home rider Paul Seixas, is arguably the most exciting subplot of the Tour — it is cycling’s future being played out in front of our eyes.
“To come to this race was never a personal achievement,” he says. “It was to learn about the three Grand Tours, because each of them is very different. This is my third one, and I came here with the feeling to not make mistakes, to do my job as the last man of the best team, and then if I am able to do something extra, I would love to do it.
“The main goal is first place for Tadej and I have to be realistic — even if I had a great year, I cannot think about me with this kind of teammate. For me, this was more of a holiday, a dream, to be stressed the hours I need to be stressed, and to enjoy the rest of the time.
“But now, as things happen, and Tadej makes a commitment like you see yesterday (to help him up Plateau de Solaison), I want to be focused, to not give anything for free, and to see if I can achieve something with the help of the guys. They want to see me up there.”
Cycling’s next North American superstar is not yet riding for himself. It does not mean he is not yet already here.
