Jay Vine may have walked away from the 2026 Tour Down Under on Sunday with the second biggest winning margins in the race’s history, but for a race which, from the results sheet, may look like the perfect run, an awful lot went wrong for UAE Team Emirates-XRG.
“It’s really incredible to be able to wear this jersey, but I just sort of can’t fathom how we’ve had so much bad luck as a team the last couple of days,” said the Australian two-time Tour Down Under winner on Sunday.
Though on stage 4, it was only moments into the race when Narváez crashed out, sustaining several stable thoracic vertebrae compression fractures, while Vegard Stake Laengen also abandoned with an injured rib. Then, on the final day of racing on a tough Stirling circuit, the local wildlife added another degree of difficulty, with two kangaroos jumping into the peloton and causing further crashes among the field.
Vine and his teammate Mikkel Bjerg both came down, fortunately without the rider in the ochre leader’s jersey being injured, but the Dane wasn’t as lucky, and after having done a huge amount of work in the stage already and then helping as Vine returned, Juan Sebastián Molano also dropped out of the race.
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