Jay Vine was in the hospital. He’d suffered a spinal injury, his neck was in a brace, but above all he was starving. Absolutely starving. “I crashed at 4pm on the Thursday and they didn’t let me eat until the Sunday morning. I was so hungry,” the Australian says. But he was being denied food for good reason. “They hadn't told me, but they were telling my wife that I wasn’t out of the woods just yet and I might not make it.” As in, they feared for his life? “Yeah,” he goes on. “They weren’t sure if the swelling had stabilised, or if it was going to continue and either paralyse or end me.”
The UAE Team Emirates rider, 28, was one of 12 riders to crash at April’s Itzulia Basque Country, and along with Jonas Vingegaard and Stef Crass who both punctured lungs among other injuries, he was in the most serious of situations. To compound matters, his wife, Bre, was 22 weeks pregnant with their first child. “My poor wife was dealing with the news, calling my parents on the other side of the world, and trying to protect an unborn baby,” Vine reflects.
Five months on, Vine is speaking to Rouleur on the second rest day of the Vuelta a España where he’s leading the King of the Mountains classification. He’s mended, fit and motivated again, but most importantly, he is also now the father of a little baby boy. “I am astounded that we didn't lose Harrison,” he says.
When everything hung in the balance
The Itzulia crash is somewhat infamous now, having taken out three of the Tour de France challengers: Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel and Primož Roglič. It happened 120km into the race’s stage four, a sharp right bend as the peloton raced downhill. “Unfortunately or fortunately, I remember everything,” Vine says. “I remember trying to brake as a wave of people came across me, then hitting roots and gravel. A Lidl-Trek guy then came on my right and Vingegaard was on my left. I tried to go straight and jump over a gutter, but I ended up in the ditch.”
From the TV cameras, Vine appeared motionless. “I’d never broken a bone before so I wasn’t instantly going, ‘I’ve broken my back’, but I just had this winded feeling so I assumed I’d cracked some ribs,” he reflects. “Thorns kept poking my legs so I knew I had no problems with feeling my legs, and I tapped my balls and could feel those, so I knew there wasn’t anything majorly wrong down there. But I couldn’t stand the pain of moving so I just laid there until the doctors shoved me into the back of an ambulance.”
Conscious throughout, Vine’s thoughts were immediately with his heavily pregnant wife. “We have a policy that I always send her a message saying ‘safe’ after a race because it’s a dangerous sport, but I didn’t have my phone. I felt terrible,” he says. Bre quickly raced from their home in Andorra to Bilbao where Vine was undergoing various CT and MRI scans in intensive care to decide whether or not he needed spinal surgery to treat cervical and two vertebral fractures. “When she arrived, I was coming in and out of consciousness,” Vine continues. “She refused to leave and I was telling her to please get some shut-eye, but now I understand why she didn’t want to – she didn’t know what was going to happen to me.”
Forty-eight hours after the crash, local doctors and experts from UAE and Barcelona who his team had consulted agreed that he would not require spinal surgery. “That was really good news because if they’d had to fuse my spin together, I wouldn’t be able to continue my cycling career,” he says.
The ordeal, however, was far from over. In a solid neck brace for five weeks, it would be a fortnight before Vine was discharged from the hospital. “The doctors knew I was stable enough that I wasn't going to die in my sleep and I still had all my senses up to my chest, but they still needed to keep a close eye on me.” Team managers Mauro Gianetti and Joxean Fernández Matxin visited him, and gradually attention turned to the future. “I didn’t want to get bogged down with 12 months of recovery before racing again, but equally I didn’t want to compromise the healing process,” he says.
The road to recovery
When he returned home to the Pyrenees, Vine found himself reading non-fiction novels and books on the Korean and WWII wars. “They had it worse than me, so I knew then I could get over a tumble on a bicycle,” he smiles. In early May, five weeks after the crash, Vine resumed light training on the indoor trainer. “But it was two hours for the entire week,” he points out. “30 minutes one day, a rest day, then 15 minutes, then two days off because of headaches. It was slow progression and I was sleeping all the time because it was taking a lot out of me.” Gradually, though, Vine was able to increase the volume and intensity. “I pushed it up to one hour at an easy endurance pace of 200 watts, and then morning and afternoon sessions,” he says. All the while, he was still moving his head “like a robot”.
After eight weeks, he was given the green light to ride outside but with one caveat: he could only go uphill because there were concerns about the vibrations his neck would feel when descending. “So for five weeks, I’d cycle up a mountain, and Bre – whose own mobility was getting worse with the baby approaching – would meet me in the car and drive me down,” he says. Finally, at the end of July when he had reached 15-hour training weeks, he was permitted to ride downhill, and shortly after he returned to racing at the Vuelta a Burgos – four months on from Itzulia.
Remarkably, he won the stage four 18.5km time trial. “Any other year I would have been the favourite to win the TT and the race overall if I was in good shape and not make mistakes like I usually do, but I knew I’d need special legs on that day to win,” he says. “I’d done lots of TT work on the trainer during my recovery, but I was astounded that I was able to win given what had happened. It was incredible.” Vine, just like Vingegaard and Cras who both competed at the Tour, was back, but it’s still taken him a while to refamiliarise himself with navigating around a peloton. “Bunching has been the biggest and hardest thing,” he says. “It was like going back to square one.”
As the Vuelta approaches its climax, Vine is in the King of the Mountains jersey, the same classification he was leading in 2022 after winning two stages, only to crash out on stage 18. “I had no illusions I was brought here to help the guys, and I’m really proud I’m able to,” he says. But his work has once more been fraught with peril: on stage 13, his teammate Brandon McNulty slid under a guardrail and fell into bushes down an embankment, with Vine himself coming to a halt and banging his knee. “That was a heart-in-mouth situation, seeing him fall off the side of a mountain,” Vine admits. “All the adrenaline fell out of me and I was barely moving on the final climb after that.”
Just five months on from his own horror crash, Vine had again come face-to-face with the dangers posed by cycle racing. “I wouldn’t say it gave me flashbacks, but just more shock. The speeds we’re riding now… Jesus, if you make a mistake…” he tails off. “It’s very surprising how few fatalities we have in this sport because, in some of the places where you crash, there’s not much room for error. In MotoGP, a guy crashes at 120mph but has rubber padding and a runoff space. For us, it’s a lot less.” For now, though, he prefers to think about his newborn son who was born just days before the Vuelta. “He’s perfect, beautiful and happy,” he smiles. “And thank God he is perfect because I don’t know how I’d be if he wasn’t.”
