In 2019, UAE Team Emirates sent young Slovenian rider Tadej Pogacar to La Vuelta, one month before his twentieth birthday, at the start of the Torrevieja salt flats, followed in 2022 by young Spaniard Juan Ayuso, one month before his twentieth birthday, at the start of Utrecht, in the Netherlands. This year, departing from Lisbon, Portugal, the chosen one is twenty-year-old Mexican Isaac Del Toro.
Pogacar and Del Toro began their careers by winning the Tour de l’Avenir, the u23 Tour de France that Ayuso, who also won the u23 Giro d’Italia, had to abandon after crashing on stage four. Neither Pogacar, Ayuso nor Del Toro were scheduled to start a Grand Tour so early in their careers, but their results have accelerated their development process (Pogacar winner of the 2019 Tour of California, Ayuso 5th in the Volta Catalunya and 4th in the Tour de Romandie in 2022, Del Toro stage winner and 3rd in this year’s Tour Down Under). Pogacar finished 3rd in La Vuelta 19 and Ayuso 3rd in La Vuelta 22. So that’s what the statistics promise Del Toro, but there are still three weeks of roads to cover.
Del Toro is only the fifth Mexican to take part in La Vuelta. The pioneer was Felipe Enriquez Rojas, nicknamed ‘El Tato’ (the brother). Hailing from Petlalcingo, in the Free and Sovereign State of Puebla in the southeast of Mexico, he raced for a year in Europe in the Italian Alba-Cucine-Benotto-Sidermec team, which contested La Vuelta 1988, the only edition that kicked off in the Canary Islands. His former Italian team-mates Antonio Santaromita and Alessandro Giannelli remember his kindness, his sadness of being away from his fiancée, his difficulty in understanding the subtleties of European-style racing: “And he was on a mission to help us find our way back to the hotel in Tenerife by bike because he was the only Spanish speaker in the group”. Benotto cycles had given four promising Mexicans a chance and Enriquez pulled out of La Vuelta 1988 during stage 16.
On the other hand, the best Mexican cyclist of all time, Raul Alcala, finished 7th in La Vuelta 1991 and 8th in La Vuelta 1992, in the colours of the Dutch PDM team. In 1991, he took 2nd place in the time trial of Cala d’Or won by eventual overall winner Melchor Mauri. He also won two stages in the Tour de France, in 1989 and 1990.
Miguel Arroyo, the protégé of Greg LeMond’s Mexican masseur, finished 36th in La Vuelta 1992 as a member of the GB-MG team with Franco Ballerini, and called it a race on stage 5 of La Vuelta 1995, which he was racing after the Tour de France for the French outfit Chazal-MBK-König, currently known as Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale.
Julio Alberto Perez Cuapio, a major figure in the Giro d’Italia having competed in nine of them and won the mountain classification in 2002, took part in La Vuelta 2001 with his Italian team Panaria-Fiordo and finished 9th in the uphill time trial in Ordino won by José María ‘El Chava’ Jimenez.
Del Toro has a good knowledge of the history of his compatriots who raced pro in Europe, but he is a very different cyclist, hyper-connected, unlike Enriquez in 1988, with his more than 100,000 followers on Instagram. He speaks fluent English and Italian. He thinks everything is “cool”: “Travelling, having dinner with my team-mates who are all super stars in my mind, talking to Tadej like a normal person”... He’s wanted to become a great climber ever since what he calls his ‘catarsis’ (emotional release) on the Col de la Loze when he won his very first international race at the Tour de l’Avenir last year. He is the product of the A.R. Monex project, based in San Marino after a first permanent mountain bike camp in Andorra, launched by brothers Luis and Alejandro Rodriguez ten years ago with the aim of giving young Mexicans the same chance as others to make it to the WorldTour. Del Toro has also raced in mountain biking, cyclo-cross and track, and as he hails from Ensenada, a Pacific port town in Baja California an hour and a half’s drive from the US border, so he benefits from a speed edge honed in California’s urban criteriums.
His stage win at the Tour Down Under was the result of a last kilometre move. He knows how to anticipate the action of a peloton. Since then, he has finished 4th in the time trial at the Volta ao Algarve between winner Remco Evenepoel and Filippo Ganna who was 6th, 4th in Tirreno-Adriatico, 7th in the Itzulia and he won the Vuelta Asturias. A climber for sure, but above all a complete and extremely talented rider, like Pogacar and Ayuso. He comes from a country with 130 million inhabitants ready to support him!
