Australians are rarely given to beating around the bush, and when it comes to summing up last season and what he expects from 2024, Jay Vine clearly believes in living up to that time-honoured national virtue in full.
“Last year, to be honest, it seemed like I was always going through the motions, trying not to screw up and every time I got to a race, and it was all going well, it all turned to pot,” Vine tells Cyclingnews with characteristic directness.
“I actually like riding my bike. I like racing,” he adds with a hefty degree of irony in his tone of voice before getting more serious again, “so that’s my goal [for 2024]. Anything on top of that is a bonus.”
Talking at the UAE Team Emirates training camp this December, it’s perhaps a sign of Vine’s expectations and ambitions that he is so dismissive of what happened in 2023, when that rollercoaster of form and misfortune was actually preceded by a massively successful January with overall victory in the Tour Down Under and a win in the Australian TT Nationals.
But then it all did, to use his own expression, ‘go to pot’. His UAE Tour ended early with a knee injury, his Giro d’Italia GC bid fell foul of a crash, dreadful weather and the aftermath of said injury all rolled into one, and his Vuelta a España subsequently went up in smoke with another abandon after falling. The fact that his Vuelta crash and abandon happened while forming part of the same, first-week breakaway that pole-vaulted eventual winner Sepp Kuss (Jumbo-Visma) into GC contention can only have rubbed salt in whatever wounds Vine sustained that day.
Still, it was notable how Vine could, despite the setbacks and morale blows, return to strength at the Tour of Turkey for an epic, solo stage 7 breakaway to victory after fending off the sprinters’ teams by himself for the best part of an hour. Yet given Turkey’s relatively minor status, that hard-earned win arguably did not gain the Australian as much international media attention as his gutsy lone effort deserved. That, in turn, maybe reminded Vine of how difficult it had been for him to catch a break, let alone win from one, since leaving Australia eight months earlier.
Speaking with Cyclingnews at UAE’s December training camp, and having scrapped his early-season racing in Australia to focus fully on his European programme, Vine is working towards nominally minimal targets for 2024.
“Hopefully a stage win of something – anything,” he says. “Hopefully…
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