By now, Jay Vine is probably used to the occasional detour en route to his final destination, but he gets there in the end. Despite the knee injury that interrupted his season at the UAE Tour, he remains set to make his Giro d’Italia debut next month.
After a week off the bike altogether and a couple more confined to his turbo trainer, Vine has been back in full training for a month as he builds towards the Grande Partenza on May 6. The final touches to his preparation will take place at a camp at Sierra Nevada this month before he travels to Italy in a UAE Team Emirates line-up that also includes João Almeida.
“It was a long and annoying process to try to get the knee mended, but first and foremost, the team was just trying to make sure there was no chronic or prolonged pain and that I’d be able to continue the season without surgery,” Vine tells Cyclingnews. “Everything’s come good now, so that’s encouraging.”
Back in late February, however, the situation was rather more vexing. In his first sparkling outings since swapping Alpecin-Deceuninck for UAE Team Emirates, Vine had collected the Australian time trial title and overall victory at the Tour Down Under. Everything shuddered to a halt at the UAE Tour, however, when a knee injury picked up in training beforehand was aggravated on the windswept opening stage.
Perhaps out of a sense of duty to his new squad, Vine still lined out in the following day’s team time trial, but when he was distanced in the opening kilometres there, it was clear that the only remedy was rest. It was not a welcome adjustment to the menu for a man whose appetite had been whetted rather than sated by his fast start to 2023.
“Everyone kept telling me that I’d got stuff in that bank, and so that was ok, but my outlook on the situation definitely wasn’t that,” Vine says. “I certainly wasn’t ready to go on a break. Mentally, at the end of last season, I was done, I was finished – I wanted to eat nothing but brownies and pizza and not even look at my bike.
“But when this injury happened, I’d only just sort of begun, so the mental side was difficult. I like to fix problems by finding a solution and getting on with it. And in this case, the solution was: hurry up and wait. So there’s not much you can do.”
Indeed, for the first week or so, Vine could do nothing at all. The nature of the injury – patellofemoral pain of the right knee – demanded as much. “Basically, I had to rest for seven days,…
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