Isaac del Toro won Tour de France Stage 3 after a late attack on the Montjuic circuit and then finishing first in Les Angles. The 196km stage with 3,850m of vertical gain turned into a decisive day for the general classification, with only 16 riders arriving within 10 seconds.
Montjuic Opens the Gap
Del Toro was two minutes down after a mechanical with 60km remaining, then chased back after the lead UAE team car drove past him and a second UAE team car sent a mechanic back down the course. He ended up riding clear of a 16-rider front group that had already been whittled down by the hard climbing and the circuit work on Montjuic.
Brandon McNulty had pulled the peloton for two laps on Montjuic before Richard Carapaz and Mattias Skjelmose tried to go clear on the descent. Del Toro answered that move, carved the final corner, and built enough of a gap before the sprint to take the stage.
Mechanical Trouble For Del Toro
The setback at 60km remaining nearly erased his day. He was left standing by the road while the lead UAE car moved on, and the recovery took him from a roadside pause to the front of the race under his own power.
There was also a complication in the caravan. Del Toro appeared to get help from the Visma and Ineos cars, but he still avoided a hefty time penalty and made the chase back to the bunch. Whether that roadside assistance situation should have resulted in a penalty is not answered, and that leaves the finish as much about the rules as the attack.
Les Angles Finish Split
Alex Molenaar, Frank van den Broek, and Felix Engelhardt formed the early breakaway, and Molenaar took the polka-dot jersey. Their move lasted long enough to contest the intermediate sprint and king of the mountains points, but the race tightened once the final climb and the run into Les Angles came into view.
Only ten more riders finished within a minute, and 11 more riders were within two minutes. Mathias Vacek was 38th and more than five minutes down. That spread shows how much damage the mountain stage did to the field before the race moves on from a day that split the contenders and rewarded the rider who recovered fastest after losing two minutes at the roadside.
