'The luckiest unlucky person around' - Jay Vine moves toward Giro d'Italia goal through a new post-injury normal

Jay Vine (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) after winning stage 5 at the 2025 Settimana Internazionale Coppi e Bartali
Jay Vine (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) after winning stage 5 at the 2025 Settimana Internazionale Coppi e Bartali (Image credit: Getty Images)

This time last year Jay Vine was in a neck brace, and just in the early stages of a recovery from a horrible accident at Itzulia Basque Country that had put him in intensive care with multiple fractured vertebrae and facing a challenging recovery ahead.

"I could have been retired after three and a half seasons," Vine reflected, as he sat in the lobby of Hilton in Adelaide at the Tour Down Under while starting a season that might never have happened had some of the worst-case scenarios after that fall on stage 4 of the Spanish WorldTour race materialised.

Simone Giuliani
Australia Editor

Simone is a degree-qualified journalist that has accumulated decades of wide-ranging experience while working across a variety of leading media organisations. She joined Cyclingnews as a Production Editor at the start of the 2021 season and has now moved into the role of Australia Editor. Previously she worked as a freelance writer, Australian Editor at Ella CyclingTips and as a correspondent for Reuters and Bloomberg. Cycling was initially purely a leisure pursuit for Simone, who started out as a business journalist, but in 2015 her career focus also shifted to the sport.