What next? How Brandon McNulty's breakout Worlds win changes his career

What next? The obvious question for a new world champion is one that Brandon McNulty has faced before. In Doha a decade ago, an 18-year-old McNulty cruised to victory in the junior men’s time trial at the World Championships, where the hefty winning margin and the smoothness of his pedalling suggested he was destined for bigger things, and soon.

But when McNulty took a seat in the press centre afterwards, he was coy about his immediate future. Riders didn’t routinely jump from the junior ranks to the WorldTour back in those pre-Remco days, but the expectation was still that an American of McNulty’s ability and ambition would rush to set up base camp in Europe. 

There were murmurs that McNulty was on the radar of Axel Merckx’s Axeon squad, but the rider himself politely demurred when we put the question to him that afternoon. “We haven't decided on a team because my coach and I were basically focusing on the Worlds,” McNulty said.

In the end, McNulty opted for a road less travelled, ignoring his suitors across the Atlantic and opting to sign for US-based Continental squad Rally for 2017. Cycling is a sport with precious little patience, but McNulty backed himself and took his time. “Racing full-time in Europe is something I one day want to do. I’d rather do it slowly than jump into it,” he said when he was unveiled as a Rally rider.

Roy Knickman, his manager at the LUX junior squad, had been among the advocates for McNulty to stay in the United States as a teenager. He was speaking from experience, recalling how he has been thrust from the Tour de Romandie directly into the Giro d’Italia within weeks of arriving in Europe to ride for La Vie Claire in 1986.

“They swore I wouldn’t do a Grand Tour, and there I was racing 31 days straight. I was toast,” Knickman told Velo in 2017. “It showed me that I was expendable. Cycling is a business.”

With that advice as a guide, McNulty would spend three years with Rally, staying with the team as it progressed to Pro Continental level. His racing calendar improved by the season, and so did his performances. By the time he won the Giro di Sicilia in early 2019, it was clear that he was ready for the next step. 

McNulty had options, but he settled upon UAE Team Emirates, then in a reboot phase and starting to build an identity for itself as a prime destination for young talent. Mikkel Bjerg, whom McNulty had beaten to gold in Doha, was already there, as was a kid from Slovenia he had beaten soundly at the Junior Peace Race in 2015.

By the time McNulty joined the team in 2020, Tadej Pogačar had streaked far ahead of him, but the Arizonan was sanguine about the comparison when I sat down with him ahead of his UAE debut at the Vuelta a San Juan.

“I think everyone has their own pace, the same with Pogačar,” McNulty said. “When we were juniors, I remember beating him and now he’s pretty incredible. Everyone has their own rate of development.”

UAE COO Andrea Agostini, doubling as press officer for the trip to Argentina, sat in on the interview – not to shoot down questions, he explained apologetically, but to encourage more expansive answers from a polite but inherently reserved young man. 

McNulty’s reserve was on show again when he made his Grand Tour debut at that year’s pandemic-delayed Giro d’Italia. A storming ride on the stage 14 time trial to Valdobbiadene moved him up to fourth overall, but he played a straight bat in the media scrum beyond the finish line, when one interviewer enthusiastically trumped his podium prospects. 

“Yeah, hopefully,” McNulty said shyly, though that careful answer didn’t stop one Italian newspaper from running with the headline “McNulty: I want the podium” the following morning.

It didn’t work out that way, but McNulty’s performances across the three weeks and his 15th place in Milan seemed to augur well for his future prospects as a leader. 

The problem, however, was that Pogačar had just gone electric by winning the Tour de France at the first attempt on the eve of his 22nd birthday. It was clear that everything at UAE would now revolve around Pogačar’s stratospheric talent, and in the years that the followed, McNulty found himself operating as a foot soldier in his service at the Tour.

In 2022, McNulty started his season with a series of astonishing long-range raids at Challenge Mallorca, the Ardèche Classic and Paris-Nice before toggling into domestique duty at the Tour, and that July initially seemed to mark a turning point in McNulty’s career. 

A cluster of coronavirus cases meant UAE reached Paris with just four riders, and McNulty stepped up to the plate with a thunderous performance on Pogačar’s behalf at Peyragudes, where only the Slovenian and yellow jersey Jonas Vingegaard could live with his fearsome pacesetting.

But the reality of life at UAE was laid bare soon afterwards, when McNulty rode the Vuelta a España and found himself riding in support not just of João Almeida, but also of 19-year-old Juan Ayuso, who became the youngest Grand Tour podium finisher in over a century. A few weeks later, UAE prised Jay Vine, the breakout star of that Vuelta, out of his contract at Alpecin.

It would be easy for a rider to lose sight of himself in a squad with a roster as deep as that, and McNulty found himself trying on different hats for size in the years that followed. 

In 2023, he went to the Giro d’Italia to hunt stages, claiming a fine win in Bergamo ahead of Ben Healy. In 2024, week-long stage races were a focus either side of the Paris Olympics, with McNulty taking third at Paris-Nice and then winning the CRO Tour at season’s end. 

Last season, McNulty reminded everyone of his Grand Tour potential by placing ninth at the Giro d’Italia, but the emergence of Isaac del Toro on that same race reminded the American of his place in the firmament at UAE.

No matter, McNulty took full advantage of the opportunities that fell his way in 2025, winning the Tour de Pologne, another CRO Tour and, most notably, claiming the Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal after a two-up break with Pogačar.

“We could see him as a protagonist in a Grand Tour,” UAE CEO Mauro Gianetti told Domestique after McNulty secured victory in Poland. Perhaps, but probably not on his team, even if McNulty has never shown the slightest inclination towards testing the waters elsewhere.

Instead, McNulty’s consistency last year made him an automatic selection for the Tour de France, with sports manager Matxín Joxean Fernandez making a point of confirming as much at the team’s media day in December. At the Tour, McNulty dutifully took his place amid the murderers’ row of talent that helped Pogačar to his fifth victory, slotting in alongside men like Del Toro, Tim Wellens and Adam Yates. 

On at least fifteen other teams at the Tour, McNulty would have been a GC leader. At UAE, he was consigned to working in the engine room, but it’s a task he’s always performed without complaint, as he explained to Domestique last year.

“That’s just kind of how this team is: you have guys that are crazy talented all over that I’m happy to work for and when my turn comes, I try to take it,” he told us. “It’s nice to seize opportunities, for sure.”

McNulty did just that at the Montréal World Championships, where he claimed the kind of victory that seems surprising at first glance and yet becomes entirely logical on closer analysis. The strength and cohesion of Michael Creed’s US team played a part, with McNulty’s friend Matteo Jorgenson deservedly carrying off the Oscar for best supporting actor by covering his winning move.

But the race still came down to McNulty’s own gifts, which have been hiding in plain sight for the last decade. The elegant style we already saw in Doha carried him clear with 33km to go, and as a pro, he has shown a repeated knack for lasting the distance in situations like that.

The smoothness of McNulty’s pedalling was such that his suffering on the final climb of Voie Camillien-Houde would have passed unnoticed had his gap not suddenly shrunk. But McNulty didn’t panic. The storm abated, and he kept on going, moving inexorably towards another rainbow jersey, one decade after the last.

And what next? It remains to be seen how the title of world champion will change McNulty’s standing at UAE Team Emirates-XRG, if at all. Pogačar remains the undisputed alpha of the team, after all, even if Gianetti et al pushed back on his bid to rush back from injury and ride this weekend’s European Championships.

Del Toro is very clearly the next in line in the succession plan, as Pogačar’s efforts to save his podium place at the Tour demonstrated so publicly. And the roster remains as imposingly deep as ever, with men like João Almeida, Adam Yates, Jay Vine, Tim Wellens, Jhonatan Narváez and Jan Christen all vying for opportunities.

Michael Rasmussen was quick to question McNulty’s status, telling ViaPlay it would be “extremely uncool to see McNulty in the world champion’s jersey sitting as the third or fourth last rider for UAE, with his pockets full of water bottles, before pulling off and leaving the two stars to fight for the victory with Pogačar and Del Toro.”

As that viral video of his solo dancing demonstrated, McNulty is unlikely to care too much about what anyone, least of all Rasmussen, thinks about the relative cool of his tenure in the rainbow jersey.

Of greater concern will be the internal deliberations at UAE, specifically around his race programme. Despite all the encouraging talk from Gianetti, McNulty has never been given a chance to ride expressly for his own GC place at a Grand Tour since the 2020 Giro. With Pogačar and Del Toro on the scene, that hierarchy looks set for 2027 and beyond.

The Worlds victory once again underlined McNulty’s potential in one-day racing, but UAE have never seen fit to explore that possibility in any real depth. He has raced just two Monuments in the past four seasons, and on each occasion – at Liège-Bastogne-Liège last year and Milan-Sanremo in 2026 – he was selected to perform a very specific task for Pogačar.

One imagines that McNulty will be given a little more leeway to try different things in the rainbow jersey, perhaps starting with some of the Italian races on his calendar in the coming days. But additional freedom in 2027, if it comes, seems more likely to arrive in week-long races where Pogačar and Del Toro are engaged elsewhere.

An American world champion with McNulty’s years (28) and range of gifts should make a most appealing signing for much of the WorldTour peloton, especially among those teams crying out for a project to build around. But UAE’s spending power has already seen McNulty commit to a contract that runs until the end of 2030, and, besides, he has always declared himself content to race on a team with so many options.

Not for the first time in McNulty’s cycling life, patience is likely to be a virtue, even with the rainbow jersey on the back. The title changes his career, but it seems unlikely to change the man.