“I’m happy to be back, y’know," Jay Vine (UAE Team Emirates) said as a straightforward and simple description of his feelings as he returned to Grand Tour racing at the Vuelta a España, four months after his horrendous crash in the Itzulia Basque Country. But the scale of what he has been through just to get to this point was no less remarkable for all that.
Vine was one of the major victims of the mass crash in stage 4 of the Itzulia Basque Country, that also left others like Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) seriously injured. In the Australian’s case, he suffered multiple fractures to his vertebrae in the crash, including a cervical fracture and two thoracic spine vertebral body fractures.
