Del Toro Crashes Out of Itzulia Basque Country — Stage 3 Abandon Throws UAE's Ardennes Leadership Into Chaos
Isaac del Toro has abandoned the Itzulia Basque Country after crashing early on stage 3, with the UAE Team Emirates-XRG leader pulling over to the team car with 85 kilometres still to race on the rolling 152.8-kilometre day in Basauri. The 22-year-old Mexican was visibly in pain as he handed his race number to the commissaire — a heavy blow to a UAE spring that until this morning was running at maximum voltage on every front.
The crash happened in a nondescript group pile-up roughly 70 kilometres into a stage that had been expected to offer Del Toro one of his last chances to claw time back on yellow jersey holder Paul Seixas. The Mexican — who had finished eighth in the Bilbao opening time trial, 51 seconds down on the 19-year-old — was already sliding down the GC after a brutal stage 2 in which Seixas took another two minutes out of the field. He had ridden stage 3 with the intention of marking attacks ahead of Thursday's Galdakao queen stage. Instead he became the latest name added to the Itzulia casualty list.
Del Toro was able to remount and ride on briefly under team car assistance before signalling to sporting director Fabio Baldato that he could not continue. UAE Team Emirates-XRG confirmed in a short statement that Del Toro was taken directly to the team hotel for assessment and "appeared to have escaped fractures" — but any attempt to race again this week is clearly off the table. It is the first WorldTour abandon of the Mexican's rapidly-rising career, and it arrives at the worst possible moment.
The most significant consequence sits not here in the Basque Country but five hundred kilometres north, in the Limburg hills where the Amstel Gold Race rolls out on April 19. UAE had constructed their entire Ardennes plan around Del Toro. He was the nominated leader for Amstel Gold Race and La Flèche Wallonne, with the expectation that he would then slot into the support cast for Tadej Pogačar at Liège-Bastogne-Liège. That plan now needs to be rewritten in under eleven days.
The problem for sports director Mauro Gianetti is that UAE's depth in the punchy-climber category is genuinely thin once you strip out Pogačar himself — and the Slovenian's Monument Grand Slam quest has its own schedule. Brandon McNulty is at altitude preparing for the Giro d'Italia. Adam Yates is still building back from a crash at the Volta a Catalunya. Juan Ayuso is focused on the final three days of Itzulia and then a targeted run at the Giro. The obvious solution — that Pogačar himself simply leads the whole Ardennes campaign on top of everything else — may now become inevitable.
For Del Toro personally, the abandon is a significant setback in what had been a near-perfect start to his season. The 22-year-old arrived in Spain on the back of a podium at Tirreno-Adriatico and an aggressive Strade Bianche performance, and had openly targeted Itzulia as the next step in a trajectory that has him being spoken of as a future Grand Tour contender. His next scheduled race will likely be pushed back to the Tour de Romandie in late April — though that depends entirely on the results of tomorrow's imaging.
Itzulia organisers issued an end-of-stage statement noting only that "we wish Isaac del Toro a full and speedy recovery." UAE Team Emirates-XRG have now lost one of their five Grand Tour-capable riders for the remainder of the week and face an Ardennes leadership vacuum twelve days out from Amstel. In a spring that has given the Emirati squad everything — Flanders, Sanremo, Strade Bianche — the first real piece of bad news has landed with a thud on a quiet Wednesday in Basauri.