The Tour Down Under loves its kangaroo iconography. Any given cycling season only truly begins once everyone gets to see images of star riders holding little baby joeys, and the first WorldTour race of the season also features a kangaroo as its mascot (Oppy, per the TDU, "represents dedication, grit and an enduring passion for cycling"). The point is to play to the rest of the world's mild, smirking affection for kangaroos, in a mostly successful effort to show part of what makes Australia unique. Carlos Alcaraz will get a kangaroo tattoo if he wins the Australian Open! Everyone loves kangaroos!
All of which is to say that when one encounters the news that a pair of kangaroos rattled through the peloton and caused a crash at the Tour Down Under, it is fair to meet the news with more amusement than horror. However, this not a whimsical story. Roughly one-third of the way through the fifth and final stage of the race, two kangaroos leapt into the main pack. Video of the incident picks up shortly after it happened, with one large kangaroo shown writhing around then leaping through and out of the peloton.
British rider Matthew Brennan went on to win the stage (expect to read that sentence a lot this year), and when speaking about the marsupial madness, expressed some surprise at both the size and number of kangaroos involved. "They were quite big—I wasn't expecting that," Brennan said. "I just looked to the right and I saw this big animal. I thought, 'Oh, you're not meant to be here.' All the Aussie boys were like, 'They come in pairs,' and then all of a sudden the second one comes along and decides he's going to throw himself in front of the peloton. So we had two sacrificial kangaroos today."
Several riders went down hard: Brennan's Visma teammate Menno Huising, Tudor's Lucas Stevenson, and Quickstep's Alberto Dainese were all forced to abandon, while the race-winning UAE team (another sentence to get used to) was hit especially hard. Juan Sebastián Molano and Mikkel Bjerg got knocked around by the 'roo, and the team later said Bjerg had broken his hand (he appeared to break his collarbone too—yet another eternal sentence). "Unfortunately, we lost Mikkel, and he knocked the kangaroo into me," eventual overall race-winner Jay Vine said. "So it was just like pinballing inside the group there. But I didn't fall too hard."
Vine, who also said he was thankful to be "unscathed," got some extremely unfortunate news when a scan showed he had a "significant" fracture in his wrist, which he has already undergone surgery for. That all happened one day after Jhonatan Narvaez, who was racing super strongly, fell and fractured several thoracic vertebrae. Vegard Stake Laengen hit the deck that day too, though he might be the only UAE guy not to break something.
Through acts both kangaroo-related and not kangaroo-related, the best team in cycling is off to the worst start imaginable. It will derail the seasons of most of the riders who went down, and could test UAE's depth in the races that matter later on in the season. Narvaez, last seen shepherding Tadej Pogacar through a soggy, leaden third week of the Tour de France, is one of UAE's best support riders. Bjerg, last seen hanging out near Pogacar as he won the 2024 Giro, is a critical flatland domestique. Vine has not been seen near Pogacar all that often, but he is a great rider, and you can see where this is going.
On the one hand, UAE's peloton-flattening dominance was largely a function of Pogacar and Isaac Del Toro smoking everyone; on the other, such smoking was itself a function of the team's depth. They still have plenty of great support riders, but they were touched by God last season, where this year, they were touched instead by two kangaroos.
