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A bizarre accident in the first event of the 2026 UCI World Tour left cyclists and fans with one thought: “Only in Australia.” In a turn of events that could literally only happen on one continent, Australian cyclist Jay Vine won the Tour Down Under after a kangaroo knocked him off his bicycle.
Two large kangaroos ran onto the course with about 96 kilometers remaining in the final stage of the race. Vine and UAE Team Emirates XRG teammate Mikkel Bjerg crashed into one of the animals after it hopped into the peloton. Bjerg and three other cyclists — Menno Huising, Lucas Stevenson and Alberto Dainese — were knocked out of the race because of the crash. The kangaroo was also injured and visibly struggled to make its way out of the road.
Vine exchanged bikes with a teammate and rejoined the peloton multiple kilometers down the road. The incident occurred during a high-speed stretch of an eight-lap circuit outside of Adelaide.
Vine entered Stage 5 with a 1:03 lead over Switzerland’s Mauro Schmid and won the tour by that exact margin despite the crash. He lost four of his six teammates throughout the tour because of multiple crashes, including the one with the kangaroos. His team announced that Jhonatan Narváez sustained several stable thoracic vertebrae compression fractures in one of those other accidents.
“Everyone asks me what’s the most dangerous thing in Australia and I always tell them it’s kangaroos,” Vine said after the race. “They wait and they hide in the bushes until you can’t stop and they jump out in front of you. Point proven today.
“Two of them blasted through the peloton when we were doing probably 50 kph and one of them stopped and went left, right, left right, left right and I ended up hitting its backside.”