Crash after kangaroo in peloton on final stage of Tour Down Under, race leader Jay Vine caught up and had to chase back

The challenges continued for UAE Team Emirates-XRG on Sunday’s final stage of the Santos Tour Down Under, as while the team may have started stage 5 in the enviable position of having Jay Vine in front with an almost unheard of gap to his nearest rival of 1:03 they’d lost the previously second-placed Jhonatan Narváez from the race to a nasty crash on stage 4. An injured Vegard Stake Laengen also had to leave the race 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 that there had been a crash in peloton, with a kangaroo visible hopping off the side of the road as the footage on broadcaster Seven panned back to vision of the after-effects of the crash. It showed one of Vine’s teammates, Mikkel Bjerg, on the road as Vine was remounting and starting his chase.

He then swapped bikes with Ivo Oliveira and continued to work his way back and, with the bunch sitting up, he soon returned to the field though the incident 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, so Vine had just Oliveira and Adam Yates, to support him through the rest of the stage.