Brandon McNulty claims solo UCI road world title for USA in Montreal
Brandon McNulty of the United States won the men's UCI road race in Montreal on September 27, 2026, taking the world title with a solo effort.
The 28-year-old Arizona rider, a UAE Emirates teammate of Tadej Pogacar, succeeded the Slovene as world champion in what the report calls the biggest triumph of his career; he is the first American to win the blue riband event since Lance Armstrong in Oslo in 1993. “I’m really at a loss,” McNulty said. “Until the last hundred metres, I didn’t believe it, I was so tired. I was just dying, but I kept pushing. We have said for weeks now that we had a super strong team. We talked about it, but I knew it would take a miracle. I guess miracles happen.”
McNulty launched a decisive move just more than 30km from the finish and began the closing lap with a 50-second advantage, which he managed to protect to the line despite a late chase by Tom Pidcock. Pidcock’s pursuit at one point reduced McNulty’s lead to only a handful of seconds, and he was one of the animators of the final hour of racing as the peloton repeatedly regrouped and split.
The race’s pivotal move came with 90 kilometres to go when a select group of a dozen riders slipped clear on the climb of the Voie Camillien-Houde, later reducing to an elite six that included Mathieu Van der Poel and Paris‑Roubaix winner Wout van Aert. Van der Poel, who recently completed a successful 172km lone break in the Tour of Luxembourg, pushed the pace and rode on with Oscar Onley, Primoz Roglic and Quinn Simmons as the race fragmented.
As the leading group extended its advantage, Paul Seixas’s France team joined Isaac del Toro of Mexico to organise a nine-man pursuit, but repeated accelerations and regroupings kept the situation volatile. The Belgium team’s confused tactics were cited as contributing to the race’s chaos, and Remco Evenepoel, the pre-race favourite and Olympic road race champion, was highlighted as a rider disadvantaged by those dynamics.
Evenepoel had been attempting to add the road race title to the time trial gold he won seven days earlier but was left once again to ponder what might have been as McNulty’s move proved decisive. The report likened the men’s race’s unpredictability to the previous day’s women’s race, in which Demi Vollering secured victory.
Vollering’s win in the women’s road race stood alongside McNulty’s result, but her celebrations were marred by a UCI decision to fine her 1,000 Swiss francs, impose a points deduction and issue a yellow card for a "non-compliant" racing position; the ruling did not affect the race results. Katarzyna Niewiadoma took the silver medal, and Vollering said: “In the end, your greatest competitors are also your greatest motivation.”
As the week of competition concluded, Spanish media reported that junior world champion Benjamín Noval had escaped sanction by the country’s anti-doping body Celad after El País revealed he had been found in 2024 working with José “Pepe” Martí, who was banned for 15 years in the aftermath of the Armstrong doping scandal and is prohibited from associating with athletes. Martí, who remains banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency until June, met with Noval for physiological testing while under Celad surveillance, but Noval, who was only 15 at the time, was not subjected to any sanction; Noval will race for Netcompany Ineos in 2027.
