Jay Vine may have walked away from the 2026 Tour Down Under on Sunday with the second biggest winning margins in the race’s history, but for a race which, from the results sheet, may look like the perfect run, an awful lot went wrong for UAE Team Emirates-XRG.
“It’s really incredible to be able to wear this jersey, but I just sort of can’t fathom how we’ve had so much bad luck as a team the last couple of days,” said the Australian two-time Tour Down Under winner on Sunday.
“We’ve got guys in the hospital, guys that have trained really well, prepared really well and, you know, not just our team, but also other guys in the peloton.”
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UAE Team Emirates-XRG had set the scene on stage 2, with a dominant performance from Vine and Jhonatan Narváez to both carve out a gap of either side of a minute on their rivals. At that moment, it looked like they had the two spots on the podium sewn up, such was the scale of their advantage in a race that is often decided by bonus seconds.
Though on stage 4, it was only moments into the race when Narváez crashed out, sustaining several stable thoracic vertebrae compression fractures, while Vegard Stake Laengen also abandoned with an injured rib. Then, on the final day of racing on a tough Stirling circuit, the local wildlife added another degree of difficulty, with two kangaroos jumping into the peloton and causing further crashes among the field.
“I know how it is to lose half a season because you’ve got broken bones, it’s never something you want. Also, if it’s out of your control, with what happened, it’s not good. But I’m also incredibly proud of how we stepped up with limited numbers,” said Vine of the circumstances on the final day.
Vine and his teammate Mikkel Bjerg both came down, fortunately without the rider in the ochre leader’s jersey being injured, but the Dane wasn’t as lucky, and after having done a huge amount of work in the stage already and then helping as Vine returned, Juan Sebastián Molano also dropped out of the race.
That left Vine with just Ivo Oliveira and Adam Yates to take him through to the line, but he still arrived safely with the lead group and as a result maintained his advantage of 1:03 to his nearest rival, Mauro Schmid (Jayco-AlUla). Such was the gap and circumstances that even UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s rivals could do little but express both their congratulations and sympathy in the same breath.
“You do not wish that on any director, to be picking bike riders up off the road day after day,” Jayco-AlUla sports director Matthew Hayman told reporters after the stage, just having walked back from talking to UAE DS Fabrizio Guidi. “That’s stressful for him and not nice for anyone, and they still came out on top.”
It was only the second time that the winning margin at the race has exceeded a minute, after the edition when Pat Jonker took the overall with a gap of 1:13 in 2004.
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When Vine first won in 2023, he had eleven seconds over runner-up Simon Yates. This time it was Simon’s brother Adam who did the lead-out work, which was pivotal to making sure the team’s plan to hit the race hard on the final ascent of the Corkscrew paid off.
“I think, literally, the day the course got announced with a double ascent of Corkscrew, but then with the left turn, I sent it immediately to management and I said, ‘Look, this is clearly a course that suits me’,” said Vine.
Narváez had been the team’s winning card in 2025, but with the altered dynamic caused by the inclusion of that climb, Vine had put in the work to prepare for the effort he needed to launch solo. It even went better than planned for the team, with the gap larger than anticipated and the defending champion also managing to hold on.
On that day, Vine secured his first stage victory at the Australian WorldTour race and carved out the GC gap he held to the end – with the help of his dwindling group of teammates who were “pulling extra double shifts”.
“We laid the groundwork at the start of the week, but at the end of the day, like I’ve said all week, it’s not over till it’s over,” said Vine.
But now that it is, “I think I’ve got a pretty big bar tab to pay tonight.”
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