For one weekend in September, the biggest names in road cycling trade Europe for eastern Canada — and this year the two WorldTour races on offer carry more weight than usual. The Grand Prix Cycliste de Québec (Friday 11 September) and the Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal (Sunday 13 September) are the last big one-day races before the season’s biggest prize is handed out, and with the sport’s dominant force sidelined, both look wide open.
What Happened
The Canadian double-header is back. The GP de Québec on Friday and the GP de Montréal on Sunday are the only two WorldTour one-day races staged in North America, and they have drawn two of the strongest start lists of the entire season. Riders have been arriving in Canada all week, many of them straight off a punishing Vuelta a España, to sharpen their form on roads that suit the sport’s best climbers and puncheurs.
The headline, though, is who is not here. Reigning two-time world champion Tadej Pogačar will not race in Canada — or anywhere else this year — after his season was ended by a heavy crash at the Vuelta. The Slovenian went down hard on stage 8 and was later confirmed out with a concussion, a displaced collarbone fracture and a stable fracture of the C7 vertebra. (We covered the full fallout when Pogačar abandoned the Vuelta.) Losing the man who has won the last two world titles, and who typically treats races like these as a personal playground, changes everything.
Even without him, the field is loaded. Remco Evenepoel leads a cast that includes Mexican sensation Isaac del Toro, French teenager Paul Seixas, Britain’s Tom Pidcock, American duo Matteo Jorgenson and Brandon McNulty, sprint-classics man Michael Matthews, Quinn Simmons, Juan Ayuso, Giulio Ciccone and Canadian home favourite Michael Woods. In fact, of the riders considered genuine contenders for the rainbow jersey, only Wout van Aert and Mathieu van der Poel are skipping the Canadian trip.
Why It Matters
These aren’t just two more races on a long calendar — they are the perfect dress rehearsal for the 2026 UCI Road World Championships, which the very same organisers stage in Montréal from 20–27 September. That overlap is unusually literal this year: the GP de Montréal is run on the Mont Royal circuit, the same climb the World Championships road races will grind up lap after lap. The elite men’s Worlds course sends riders over twelve laps of a 13.4 km circuit, climbing 269 metres each time for a brutal 273.7 km and roughly 3,800 metres of total elevation.
That makes Sunday’s race the closest thing to a live Worlds simulation the peloton will get, on the exact terrain, with most of the same favourites. Whoever looks strong on Mont Royal this weekend will start the World Championships nine days later with a target on their back. With Pogačar gone, Evenepoel has emerged as the clear favourite for the rainbow jersey — and a commanding ride in Canada would only harden that status. A breakout from a young gun like Seixas or del Toro, meanwhile, could reshape how every team rides the Worlds.
There’s a bigger-picture angle too. The GP de Québec is the punchier, more explosive of the two circuits — a shorter climb repeated many times, rewarding riders who can sprint after four hours of racing. The GP de Montréal is longer and harder, a true climber’s classic. Watching how the contenders split across those two very different tests tells you a lot about who is peaking at the right moment and who is still searching for form.
What This Means For You
If you just want to watch, set two alarms: the GP de Québec goes off on Friday 11 September and the GP de Montréal on Sunday 13 September, both shown through the usual WorldTour broadcasters and streaming platforms in most regions. Expect long, attritional races that usually explode in the final hour.
If you ride, there’s a genuine lesson buried in these Canadian classics. They are not won with a single heroic effort — they are won on repeatability, the ability to go deep on a short climb, recover on the descent, and do it again dozens of times. That is exactly the demand you face on a hilly group ride, a rolling sportive or a hometown gran fondo, where the person who cracks is rarely the weakest climber but the one who can’t keep answering the accelerations.
You can train that specific quality. Short, repeated over-threshold efforts build the punch and the recovery that these races reward — our guide to Rønnestad intervals (the 30/15 workout) is a proven way to raise the ceiling, while plyometric training for cyclists adds the explosive snap that lets you jump out of a corner or over a rise without blowing up. Do both consistently and those repeated efforts on your local hills start to feel a lot less like survival.
Key Takeaways
- The GP de Québec (Fri 11 Sept) and GP de Montréal (Sun 13 Sept) are the last major WorldTour one-day races of 2026.
- Two-time defending world champion Tadej Pogačar is out after a season-ending Vuelta crash, blowing both races — and the Worlds — wide open.
- Remco Evenepoel is the man to beat, with Seixas, del Toro, Pidcock, Matthews and Woods among the challengers; only Van Aert and Van der Poel are missing.
- The GP de Montréal previews the exact Mont Royal circuit used for the 2026 World Championships (20–27 Sept).
- These races are won on repeated short climbs — the same skill that decides hilly group rides and sportives, and one you can train directly.
