The final stage of the Tour Down Under ran into a very Australian problem.
Jay Vine overcame an Australian problem to win Australia's biggest cycling race.
With about 96 kilometers to go in the final stage of the Tour Down Under, the Australian cyclist and his teammate Mikkel Bjerg crashed into a kangaroo that had run into the peloton, an incident that also took out three other riders. Vine was able to continue racing, but Bjerg had to retire.
The crash left Vine behind the pack and forced him to catch up after exchanging bikes with teammate Ivo Oliveira. Vine worked his way back into position to notch his second Tour Down Under title.
Here's how it all played out:
Vine recapped the crash in his post-race interview:
"Everyone asks me 'What's the most dangerous thing in Australia?' and I always tell them it's kangaroos, because they wait and they hide in the bushes until you can't stop, and then they jump out in front of you. Point proven today.
"Two of them blasted through the peloton as we were probably doing 50km an hour. One of them stopped and went left, right, left, right, left, right and I ended up hitting its backside as it was a flailing around on the ground. It's one of those things, bad luck, but luckily I'm OK."
Vine entered the final stage with a significant lead of 1:03, but it had already been a tough race for his UAE Team Emirates team. The seven-man team lost two riders, Jhonatan Narváez and Vegard Stake Laengen, to separate crashes in the previous stage.
UAE announced Saturday that Narváez had been hospitalized with several stable thoracic vertebrae compression fractures, while Laengen had also been taken to the hospital with a suspected rib injury. Narváez would have entered the final stage in second place if healthy.
That left UAE with only five cyclists for the stage, and that number was down to three by the end with Bjerg felled by the kangaroo and Juan Sebastián Molano also having to pull out.
Vine was relieved those bad breaks didn't prevent the win:
"This year, we started off really positive and we just had more and more bad luck as the race went on. Today was never going to be easy and I've been saying all week it's not over until it's over, but geez it's definitely proven to be never over until its over in this race for us."
Meanwhile, FloBikes reports that that the kangaroo appeared to be OK, though it seemed shaken up and frightened as the cyclists attempted to pass it.
Category: General Sports
