Isaac del Toro won Tour de France Stage 3 in Les Angles after a late move on the final climb, turning a brutal day of racing into a victory that could matter for the GC as much as the stage itself. He attacked on the final corner, opened a gap and then built on it before the sprint to the line.
The stage covered 196km and climbed 3,850m, enough to make the day feel more like a mountain test than a transfer between finishes. A front group of 16 riders came home within 10 seconds, and another 21 riders were still inside two minutes, while Mathias Vacek faded to 38th, more than five minutes down. That spread is why the day mattered now: it was not just a win, it was a sorting of who could survive the pressure.
Del Toro’s victory was even stranger because it came after a mechanical with 60km remaining, when he was left standing by the road as the lead UAE car drove past him. He lost two minutes before chasing back to the bunch, and there was a further wrinkle later when Paul Seixas punctured, changed bikes and rejoined near the final circuit. The gap has left room for questions about whether cars from Visma and Ineos may have helped Del Toro while he was stranded, but nobody appears to have spotted enough to trigger a major time penalty, and the intervention was not treated as decisive enough to change the result.
That uncertainty sits inside a stage that was supposed to be controlled by the road itself. The route climbed from the start and went over Collada de Toses, La Molina and the Col du Calvaire before the finish, with Brandon McNulty pulling the peloton for two laps on the Montjuic circuit and Richard Carapaz and Mattias Skjelmose trying to escape on the descent. Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel were marking Tadej Pogačar, which meant the fight for position never really stopped and the late attack had room to decide everything.
The finish into Les Angles helped make that possible. The road turned tight with 1.7km to go and then climbed mostly around 7% through a series of hairpins, a final stretch that rewards timing as much as power. Del Toro got both, and unless the roadside assistance issue leads to a review, Stage 3 is likely to be remembered less for how he won than for the fact that he won after a mechanical, a chase and a climb that tested the whole race.
