Jay Vine wins Tour Down Under after crash caused by kangaroo
ADELAIDE, Australia — Australian Jay Vine was knocked down by a kangaroo during the final stage Sunday, but recovered to win the Tour Down Under cycling race, the first event of the 2026 World Tour.
Vine was knocked off his bike when two large kangaroos bounced onto the road on a high-speed section with about 60 miles to go in the hilly 105-mile stage through the hills around Adelaide.
Three riders – Menno Huising, Lucas Stevenson and Alberto Dainese – were forced to abandon the race and one kangaroo was injured.
“Everyone asks me what the most dangerous thing is in Australia, and I always tell them it’s the kangaroos,” said Vine, who won his home race for the second time in three years. “They wait and hide in the bushes until you can’t stop and they jump in front of you. It’s proven today.
“Two of them went through the peloton when we were probably going 50 km/h. [30 mph]and one of them stopped and went left, right, left, right, left, right, and I ended up hitting his butt.”
Vine led the race by 1 minute and 3 seconds in the general classification going into the final stage. But he was already at a disadvantage as two members of his UAE Team Emirates team, including defending champion and then runner-up Jhonatan Narvaez, crashed during the fourth stage on Saturday.
Juan Sebastian Molano also abandoned the tour on Sunday due to fatigue, leaving Vine with just two teammates for the final stage: Ivo Emanuel Oliveira and Adam Yates.
Vine got up immediately after his fall and changed bikes twice before rejoining the peloton with about 57 miles remaining.
He remained at the front of the peloton for the rest of the stage and finished 1:03 ahead of Swiss Mauro Schmid (Team Jayco Alula) and Australian Harry Sweeny (EF Education – EasyPost) who was still nine seconds behind.
The Briton Matthew Brennan (Team Visma) won the stage in the sprint ahead of the New Zealander Finn Fisher-Black (Bora Hansgrohe) and the Dane Tobias Lund Andresen (Decathlon).
The stage covered eight laps of a circuit which involved a slow, steep climb to the finish in the town of Stirling. There were two breakaways during the stage, the second of which returned to the peloton less than a kilometer from the finish.
Vine managed to overcome a lot of bad luck to win the race.
“This year we started very positively, and we had more and more bad luck as the race went on,” he said. “Today was never easy, and I said all week it’s not over until it’s over.
“But it turned out it wasn’t over until it was the end of this race for us.”
