“I’m going to say it as I see it, just like I normally do,” Laura Kenny stresses as the most successful female competitor in British Olympic history prepares to start working on “the dark side” in the media. “People want to know what I think and what I would have done or what they should’ve done. I think being honest is the best way.”
From London 2012 to the Tokyo Games in 2021, Kenny won six Olympic medals, five of them gold, as a track cyclist who was bold and brave, exhilarating and gritty. She will travel next week to the Paris Olympics and work for the BBC as a pundit while writing a column for the Guardian.
But the 32-year-old brushes aside any doubts that she might want to tone down her direct way of speaking and avoid questioning or offending anyone, including members of the British Olympic squad who she knows so well and loves. As a sprint cyclist her husband, Jason, won nine Olympic medals, seven of them gold, and he is now the coach of the GB men’s sprint squad while also being a sounding board for other riders, including Emma Finucane, a possible British star of these Games. The 21-year-old sprint cyclist from Wales is already a world champion and the Kennys believe she will be a serious contender in three events in Paris.
It is still surprising to think that, if they were a country, Laura and Jason Kenny would share 22nd place in the list of gold medal-winning Olympic nations. But Kenny herself is more interested in talking plainly than resorting to stats or the bland platitudes often favoured by former sportspeople who would prefer to skate safely across the surface than tell the unvarnished truth. “Being able to speak out has been my biggest tool throughout my career,” she says. “Whether talking to a coach, a teammate or the media, I’ve always told them straight how I’m feeling.”
We are sitting in the front room of a house on a rainy summer evening in Macclesfield and Kenny is riveting company. She tells me how the most painful period of her life was darkened by the fact that, against her natural instincts, she stopped speaking openly and descended instead into miserable silence after enduring the double shock of a miscarriage in November 2021 followed by an ectopic pregnancy in January 2022. “I slipped into a personality that wasn’t mine,” Kenny says. “Throughout my career I’d been so open and honest but I couldn’t be myself when I really needed to talk.”
Kenny looks up as she returns to that difficult place. “Maybe it’s because it felt like failure. My body wasn’t doing something which I desperately needed it to do, which was to give us a second child alongside Albie [her eldest son]. I could no longer rely on my body which, until then, had never let me down. Of course it wasn’t a completely smooth line to all those gold medals. There were bumps in the road – but nothing catastrophic. I came back from a broken shoulder, a broken arm, and won more medals. But the one thing I really wanted my body to do, it wouldn’t.”
She shakes her head. “People don’t speak openly about losing a baby. We hide it, thinking it’s a failure, but we shouldn’t.”
For many months Kenny could not talk to anyone, apart from Jason, about how she felt. She lay awake night after night, unable to sleep or “stuck on Google”, before finally confiding in her mother. She was shocked when her mum revealed that she, too, had endured a miscarriage. Talking helped and Kenny eventually expressed her pain in public when, in an Instagram post in April 2022, she wrote: “I miscarried our baby at 9 weeks. I’ve never felt so lost and sad. It felt like a part of me had been torn away.”
Two years ago Kenny competed at the Commonwealth Games which, for cycling, was held at the Olympic velodrome where she had won two gold medals in 2012. “Oh, it was awful,” she says. “I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want another gold medal.”
The night before the scratch race, her final event, Kenny was bereft. “I said to my mum: ‘I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to step on that velodrome tomorrow.’ She was like: ‘You don’t have to.’ But we spoke and spoke and she said: ‘Why don’t you race it like it is your last race?’ Something clicked. But at the start line I got drawn at the back as I had no points because I’d missed a whole year. I was panicking, thinking ‘Oh, this is awful’. And then a guy in the crowd shouts: ‘You’ve got this, Laura.’”
Kenny laughs. “I thought: ‘Yes, I have.’ I’d done it so many times before. So it was nice to finally cross the finish line and win again.”
She then pauses. “But it wasn’t the feeling I wanted, ultimately. I did that [BBC] interview afterwards and some people were shocked that I’d said it out loud [and spoken about her grief]. But I’m not going on camera to say: ‘Yeah, really happy with everything. I’ve won another gold medal.’ It had been hell on earth for 18 months before the Commonwealths.”
Kenny only truly dealt with her profound sense of loss, and searing grief, once her second son, Monty, was born, a year ago on 20 July 2023. She seems blissfully happy now but she presents a stark contrast when describing the dread she experienced while pregnant with Monty: “Honestly, the amount of money we paid on private scans, just so I could have peace of mind. Jase kept saying it was all right because we were doing it for my sanity. It helps to stop you thinking: ‘Is he moving, is he still there?’ That’s how I felt for ages – like he was going to go. Like why would this baby stick?”
She looks concerned too when explaining how much Jason suffered and recalls how she had been oblivious to his buried trauma. They did a joint interview with Susie Wolff and, after listening to Laura, the former racing driver turned to Jason and asked how he felt. “He burst out crying,” Kenny says. “He just said how ‘shit’ it had all been. I’d never heard him swear in an interview and I was like: ‘Wow, I didn’t understand how much it was hurting him.’ And then he had no words. He couldn’t finish the sentence. It made me realise that nobody actually ever asked Jason if he was OK.”
Being open matters so much to Kenny and she adds: “Expressing yourself honestly is so important in sport and life. You’re allowed to be wrong, as long as you can admit you’ve made a mistake or say you’re sorry – or just agree to disagree. That’s my personality. It’s who I am.”
Kenny tells a story of how, when she was 19, she spoke bluntly about the abrasive atmosphere which affected GB’s team pursuit squad in 2011. Six women were fighting for three places at London 2012 and the teenager decided that she had had enough of teammates swearing at each other and battling for themselves individually rather than working as a team.
“There were some training sessions where people would be shouting all sorts,” Kenny recalls. “I didn’t like that environment. I just said: ‘I’m not having people talk to me like that.’ So I spoke to Paul Manning [their coach] and to Steve Peters [then the sports psychiatrist at British Cycling]. It led to a team meeting and it’s hard sitting in a room with seven other people and you say: ‘I don’t like the way you’re speaking to me.’ And then someone else would be like: ‘Well, I don’t like the way you commit to our training sessions’. But airing our differences helped us so much. The team was in a much better place afterwards [and won gold in London].”
That resolute commitment to speaking openly underpinned Kenny’s storied career. But, surely, she feels some regret that she will now be talking about others battling for Olympic supremacy rather than competing for more medals herself? “No,” she exclaims. “There’s not been one day where I’ve thought: ‘A part of me wishes I could still be out there on my bike.’ When you want something so badly, and you get it, you find peace.
“Once Monty was born it was such a relief he was here. I did start training again and I was jealous of the grandparents looking after him. I thought: ‘Why am I doing this to myself? Why am I not just enjoying him?’ Jason and I spoke about it. Should I keep riding? Do I want to do it? Blah-blah-blah. But once I decided I’d be a lot happier looking after Albie and Monty at home I rang my agent. It seemed a really big deal and I was like: ‘I don’t know how to voice this.’ But I told him straight and he said: ‘OK, cool.’ From that call I thought: ‘OK, job done.’”
Kenny laughs in delight, as, since her retirement was announced in March, she has been able to concentrate on her family. Her two boys will accompany her, Jason and various grandparents to Paris and she sounds enthused by everything that awaits. For the next hour she talks in compelling detail about all that she wants to watch and write about in her new Guardian column – from her belief that GB can win a historic number of medals to her interest in the comebacks of Adam Peaty and Tom Daley to the prospects of Finucane and the young track cycling sprinters coached by her husband. She will take a day off so that she and Albie, who is seven, can watch Bryony Page try to add to the silver and bronze she won in trampoline gymnastics in Rio and Tokyo.
Kenny offers fascinating behind the scenes details of her past Olympic experiences and how she can use those to help people understand what it takes to win gold, and how it feels before, during and after a momentous race. But which was her sweetest Olympic victory?
“My favourite Olympics was London 2012 but the sweetest medal was the last gold I won [in the Madison in 2021] because Katie Archibald and I put so much work into that race. The fact that you go in with a plan and it works to a T doesn’t happen very often, trust me.”
Kenny is convinced Archibald could have won three golds in Paris had she not broken a leg in two places last month after tripping in her garden. She went to see Archibald recently and was relieved to find her great friend in an upbeat mood. “I told her that she’d still be on my team in Paris as I’d take a one-legged Katie Archibald over anyone,” Kenny says with a smile.
Instead, Archibald will work on a complete recovery while Kenny focuses on commenting and writing about the Olympics in Paris. “I am really looking forward to it,” she says of the columns she will write for the Guardian. “I’ll be great to express my point of view, in my own words, and give a little insight into the Olympics. I want to shine some light on what the athletes are doing in Paris and, of course, I want to tell it just as I see it.”
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