The challenges continued for UAE Team Emirates-XRG on Sunday's Santos Tour Down Under finale, as while they started stage 5 in the enviable position of having Jay Vine leading with an almost unheard of gap to his nearest rival of 1:03, they'd lost the previously second-placed Jhonatan Narváez to a nasty crash on stage 4. Domestique Vegard Stake Laengen also had to leave the race injured on Saturday.
That left the team with five riders on the start line, and then, in the early part of stage 5, there came word of a crash in the peloton, with a kangaroo visible hopping off the side of the road as the footage on broadcaster Seven panned back to show the after-effects of the crash. Riders after the stage said it was one of a pair that jumped into the bunch. Another of Vine's teammates, Mikkel Bjerg, could be seen in pain on the road as Vine was remounting and starting his chase.
"Everything was going according to plan up until that point, Sebastián [Molano] was doing a great job. The breakaway was well within reach," Vine told reporters after the stage.
"And then, unfortunately, we lost Mikkel, and he knocked the kangaroo into me. So it was just like pinballing inside the group there. But I didn't fall too hard."
He swapped bikes with Ivo Oliveira, who fixed the problem and quickly changed again so Vine could continue to work his way back. With the bunch sitting up, given the nature of the incident the race leader was involved in, he soon returned to the field, though the crash did cost him another teammate.
Bjerg was out injured after the crash, while Juan Sebastián Molano, who had done a huge volume of work earlier in the stage, also left the race, but not before doing one last acceleration to help make the junction. Vine just had Oliveira and Adam Yates to support him through the rest of the stage, but once he had returned to the group, it was enough.
"By that point, there were enough teams out there going, 'okay, the course is not as attritional as we thought'. We've still got a lot of sprinters in our group who want to get something out of this bike race, so we found a lot of help there. And having such a big gap to second place also means that the pressure wasn't entirely on us to defend," said Vine.
The incident with the kangaroo came with under 100km to go on the 169.8km day of racing, playing out over eight laps of a circuit finishing with a climb to Stirling.
Despite the added curveball thrown at the team in the form of two kangaroos, which are a common sight roadside in Australia, it was not enough to throw Vine off course. He safely crossed the line among the leading bunch to claim his second overall victory at the Tour Down Under, this time with a phenomenal advantage to his nearest rival of 1:03.
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