‘Tadej is going to do Tadej things’ – Jay Vine on bouncing back and racing with Pogačar

Australians are rarely given to beating around the bush, and when it comes to summing up last season and what he expects from 2024, Jay Vine clearly believes in living up to that time-honoured national virtue in full.

“Last year, to be honest, it seemed like I was always going through the motions, trying not to screw up and every time I got to a race, and it was all going well, it all turned to pot,” Vine tells Cyclingnews with characteristic directness.

“I actually like riding my bike. I like racing,” he adds with a hefty degree of irony in his tone of voice before getting more serious again, “so that’s my goal [for 2024]. Anything on top of that is a bonus.”

Talking at the UAE Team Emirates training camp this December, it’s perhaps a sign of Vine’s expectations and ambitions that he is so dismissive of what happened in 2023, when that rollercoaster of form and misfortune was actually preceded by a massively successful January with overall victory in the Tour Down Under and a win in the Australian TT Nationals.

But then it all did, to use his own expression, ‘go to pot’. His UAE Tour ended early with a knee injury, his Giro d’Italia GC bid fell foul of a crash, dreadful weather and the aftermath of said injury all rolled into one, and his Vuelta a España subsequently went up in smoke with another abandon after falling. The fact that his Vuelta crash and abandon happened while forming part of the same, first-week breakaway that pole-vaulted eventual winner Sepp Kuss (Jumbo-Visma) into GC contention can only have rubbed salt in whatever wounds Vine sustained that day.

Still, it was notable how Vine could, despite the setbacks and morale blows, return to strength at the Tour of Turkey for an epic, solo stage 7 breakaway to victory after fending off the sprinters’ teams by himself for the best part of an hour. Yet given Turkey’s relatively minor status, that hard-earned win arguably did not gain the Australian as much international media attention as his gutsy lone effort deserved.  That, in turn, maybe reminded Vine of how difficult it had been for him to catch a break, let alone win from one, since leaving Australia eight months earlier.

Speaking with Cyclingnews at UAE’s December training camp, and having scrapped his early-season racing in Australia to focus fully on his European programme, Vine is working towards nominally minimal targets for 2024.

“Hopefully a stage win of something – anything,” he says. “Hopefully an Olympic selection, too, and hopefully no injuries. I just want to race my bike, do my job well and enjoy it.”

2024 Giro d'Italia

Even if those goals sound relatively low key – though Olympic selection is no small matter – the reality is that neither Vine nor his team have lost faith in his potential after 2023. Quite apart from that Tour Down Under win, Vine’s hard work for teammate João Almeida in the Giro after his own chances had gone up in smoke did not go unnoticed.

The way UAE team manager Mauro Gianetti patiently threaded his way through the crowds at the finish in Val di Zoldo’s summit finish, for example, to make sure he could personally congratulate the Australian on his support that day for the Portuguese co-leader, spoke volumes about how the team management rated him.

It wasn’t just Gianetti who was impressed by Vine’s 2023 racing, either. There was a mid-season contract renewal until 2028 as concrete financial proof of UAE’s belief in his long-term potential. 

So, too, is a 2024 race programme that not only includes his two Grand Tours of 2023 all over again, but also just three major events beforehand - the UAE Tour, a race second only to the Tour in importance to the home team, as well as Paris-Nice and Volta a Catalunya. Barring Australia, it feels very much like a re-run of 2023 for Vine, and to form part of the Giro lineup with Tadej Pogačar is surely an even bigger mission than fighting for a top GC result himself in 2023 in Italy.

Vine sounds seriously enthusiastic about the idea of forming part of a Grand Tour squad with Pogačar for the first time in his career. “Going in there with Tadej, he’s usually a frickin’ favourite to win any race he starts at, so that’s going to be incredible being with the guy who’s 50% on it to win the race overall,” he says. “It’ll be spectacular.”

While Pogačar taking the Giro d’Italia overall victory is the prior objective, Vine does not feel that this will necessarily affect his own opportunity to shine, either there or at the Volta a Catalunya in March.

“I don’t think it’ll take away my chances, Jumbo-Visma just podiumed in a grand Tour with three guys,” he points out. “And the same goes in Catalunya. Especially if you have three climbing days, it should be pretty straightforward.

“Finally, it is just about the strongest person on the day. Depending on who we take, if we take the majority of the Giro team, we should have plenty of guys to work and let them talk it through themselves.”

The sheer length of the climbs in Catalunya, with multiple Pyrenean stages, will also help smooth that internal negotiating process and make no need for snap decisions, Vine points out. Making a comparison to the Tour Down Under’s most emblematic climb, he says: “It’s not like Willunga Hill, where you’ve got two kilometres at 5% to try to make a thing.”

If Catalunya will suit the team collectively, Vine confirms the 2024 Giro route definitely suits Pogačar down to the ground. 

“For sure. Stage 2 [to Oropa – ed.] being the first really hard early test is one good thing for him, then there’s a lot of time trialling, even if it’s less than last year,” Vine said.

With the Giro’s typical plethora of punchy, hilly stages dotted throughout the race, as well as the multiple races against the clock, there is plenty of terrain for Pogačar to put on some trademark performances – and that’s even before the mountains haul into view. 

Or, as Vine pithily puts it: “Tadej is going to do Tadej things.”

Heading to the Olympics?

And will Jay Vine aim to ‘do Jay Vine things’ in the 2024 Giro, too? “I’m looking forward to the time trials as well, as I’m sure they’ll form part of the selection process for the Olympics, so I’m really trying to focus on them. Obviously, there are no one-day races on my programme, so I will have to rely on stage race results to try and get my hook in there.”

When it comes to potential rivals for Vine and Pogačar come May, the picture is not yet clear, although none of the other so-called ‘Big Four’ are racing in Italy’s Grand Tour – not this May and, in some cases, perhaps never again.

“I talked to Remco [Evenepoel] and he said he’s never going to do the Giro again,” Vine says with a grin, although there’s no way of knowing if the Belgian, who has had to abandon the Italian Grand Tour twice in three years, was joking when he spoke to the UAE rider.

Yet if there’s a strong case for arguing that Evenepoel and Vine both have some unfinished business with the Giro, you could argue it’s doubly so in the Vuelta for the Australian. His first participation in 2022 went brilliantly, with two mountain stage wins, but was poleaxed when he was en route to the king of the mountains title, crashing out in the third week. Last year, meanwhile, his race hinged on another crash. 

“I was in that group with Sepp [on stage 5 to Javalambre] before the crash so at that point who knows how the rest of the race could have gone?

“Anything could happen, it all depends on how everyone [of the contenders] gets to the race,” Vine says about 2024. “I don’t know if that unpredictability makes it a better race. ‘More predictable’ is better for us riders but it’s terrible to watch. I think if looked at the viewing figures of the Giro versus Vuelta last year, for example, the Vuelta was much more exciting to watch.”

Warming to his point, he explains why he felt the 2023 Giro became overly tedious at times, mostly due to circumstances beyond anybody’s control.

“The [2023] Giro weather was so appalling that there was only so much you can do there,” he says. You’ve had had to sacrifice a whole team to get away from five other teams if they were riding defensively, and you can’t do that. Which is why we saw 12 days of breakaways last year and maybe only two days where the win came from a GC group.

“Then it was so attritional, with guys getting sick and dropping out. I think we had five GC guys drop out in the first 10 days.”

Cumulatively, the abandons were so widespread that only two teams of the 22, Jumbo-Visma and Bahrain Victorious, reached Rome with their lineups intact.

But despite his misgivings regarding last year’s Giro, Vine is very much aware that 2024 could offer a different storyline for him. Quite apart from Pogačar looking for the overall win, there’s the whole possibility that he will be able to use the Giro to get his ticket to the Olympics.

“I didn’t even bother put my hand up for Tokyo,” he says. “I was professional, but I don’t think I’d even raced a TT bike at that point, so in a professional sense this is the first time.

“It’s a dead flat course, so it’ll be all about who’s got the biggest engine, nothing like Tokyo or Rio. I’d loved to have done those courses, even London was a bit more dramatic with the corners, but it is what it is and for me, it’s the Olympics, you get to say you’re an Olympian, You get to take that away for the rest of your life and theoretically I’ve got two chances so it’s pretty high on my bucket list.”

Though Vine may say riding and racing well are his main goals for 2024, there are some major ambitions lurking within that deceptively, low-key target. As a young professional, after all, he punched well above his weight at the 2022 Vuelta, and amid all the setbacks, his first year at UAE Team Emirates was hardly a write-off.

With that experience behind him, Vine will likely waste no time getting to the point as quickly as possible again.