A Kangaroo Took Out the Race Leader (Who Then Won Anyway)

Picture the scene: professional cyclists at the Tour Down Under, deep in race mode — power meters, heart rate zones, aerodynamic everything — when two kangaroos decide the road looks interesting. One of them absolutely flattens Jay Vine. Full collision, bike and rider down. Vine gets up, dusts himself off, and wins the entire race. 🦘

I have watched the clip more times than I'm prepared to admit, and I love it beyond the comedy. There's something clarifying about it. You can measure and optimize every controllable variable of a day outside, and the outdoors will still, occasionally, send a large marsupial through your plans at forty kilometres an hour. No app has a kangaroo setting. That's not a flaw in being outside — that's the entire charm. We're guests in a place that doesn't read our itineraries, and every so often it reminds us, ideally without injuries and with excellent footage.

The irony is that the same week delivered a pile of news about technology promising to make the outdoors more predictable. Google rolled out Gemini navigation in Maps for walking and cycling, so you can ask for the nearest bike shop hands-free instead of fumbling with a phone at an intersection — genuinely useful, this one; fewer glowing rectangles between you and the road is a good trade. Garmin's Venu 4 finally looks like a watch rather than a wrist computer. And norda collaborated with gnuhr on trail gear built with Dyneema, because apparently this is the season of putting body-armor fibers in outdoor equipment.

I'm not cynical about any of it — better navigation and gear that lasts are honest improvements. I'd just gently note the kangaroo's position in this story: all of that technology was present in the peloton, and none of it mattered for the day's decisive event.

Elsewhere, Alex Honnold free-soloed the outside of Taipei 101 — 500 metres of skyscraper, no rope, livestreamed by Netflix — and the climbing community has been talking all week about what it means when that kind of risk becomes broadcast entertainment. I don't have a tidy opinion and I'm suspicious of anyone who does. I'll just say my own relationship with heights involves considerably more rope.

And one deeply unglamorous public service announcement from the week's reading: apparently almost nobody ever cleans their home gym equipment. If you own dumbbells, when did you last wipe them down? Exactly. Go do that, then go outside — and if you meet a kangaroo, I hope you handle it like Jay Vine.