British sprinter Matthew Brennan yesterday swept to victory in the final stage as Jay Vine survived a high-speed collision with a straying kangaroo to win his second Tour Down Under.
Brennan, 20, coming off a breakthrough season with 14 wins for Team Visma-Lease a Bike last year, finished a misfiring week with a stage win from New Zealand’s Finn Fisher-Black (Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe) and Denmark’s Tobias Lund Andresen (Decathlon CAM CGM).
Vine overcame a torrid final day of the UCI World Tour season opener finishing with just two of his six UAE Emirates XRG teammates to support him after he ploughed into a kangaroo and came off his bike with 95km left of the hilly 169.8km fifth stage into Stirling in the Adelaide Hills.
Photo: AFP
Vine led the race by 1 minute, 3 seconds on general classification entering the last stage, but he was already at a disadvantage because two of his teammates, including the defending champion and then second-placed Jhonatan Narvaez, crashed out in the fourth stage on Saturday.
Juan Sebastian Molano also abandoned the tour because of fatigue, leaving Vine with only two teammates on the last stage: Ivo Emanuel Oliveira and Briton Adam Yates.
Vine got up immediately after his crash and changed bikes twice before rejoining the peloton with about 92km remaining.
Photo: AFP
“We started the week off positive, but we just had more and more bad luck as the race went on and today was never going to be easy,” Vine said. “Two kangaroos blasted through the peloton as we were doing 50kph and I ended up hitting one of them. Luckily, I am okay and happy to be able to hold on to the leader’s jersey and take the overall.”
He remained near the front of the peloton for the rest of the stage, to finish ahead of Mauro Schmid of Switzerland (Team Jayco Alula) and Harry Sweeny (EF Education-EasyPost) of Australia who was a further nine seconds behind.
“Everyone asks me what’s the most dangerous thing in Australia and I always tell them it’s kangaroos,” said Vine, who won his home race for the second time in three years. “They wait and they hide in the bushes until you can’t stop and they jump out in front of you. Point proven today.”
The stage covered eight laps of a circuit which involved a slow, steep climb to the finish in Stirling. There were two breakaways during the stage, the second of which came back to the peloton with only 1km remaining.
Vine overcame an enormous amount of bad luck to win the race.
“This year we started off really positive and we just had more and more bad luck as the race went on,” he said. “Today was never going to easy and I’ve been saying all week it’s not over until it’s over, but it’s proven to be not over till it’s over in this race for us.”
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