Even for a cyclist as gilded as Laura Kenny, this was probably her greatest ride – Dame, set and match. Shaken to the core by team-mate Matt Walls' horrific crash 24 hours earlier, and repulsed by her own form in a dismal points race, Kenny revealed she was on the brink of quitting on Sunday night, admitting: “I felt lost.”
Worn down by personal tragedy, it would have been an understandable to retreat into the shadows. But Kenny – brave, blustering, and rejuvenated by a timely infusion of bulldog spirit – summoned the willpower to land only her second Commonwealth Games title in a dramatic scratch race.
And as she caressed the latest crock of gold around her neck, the five-times Olympic champion said: “It feels amazing. Yesterday I thought was going to be my last bike race.
“Everything about it I just didn’t enjoy. Even before the start, I didn’t know if I could do it. I came in this morning in a completely different mindset, thinking, ‘Of course you can do it.’ “I told myself in the toilet, ‘You need to race as Laura Trott,’ that old bike rider who didn’t think about anything else other than crossing that finish line first. When I changed my mindset, I just felt completely different.”
Hang on – was she really on the verge of hanging up her bike? “Yes,” she confirmed. “I can’t tell you how hard it is just to keep coming back. it’s easy isn’t it, you put on a mask and people forget. Doing my shoulder was one thing. that was a push. The personal stuff was a push too far. It was just literally the worst thing I’ve ever been to. It felt like it took everything away from me.
“It’s difficult to go out and race when your heart isn’t really in it any more, so why am I doing it? Who am I actually doing it for, because it certainly isn’t me. Then last night I just had a realisation where I was like, 'Of course you want to do it, you just went through all of that for six months and the first thing you thought you wanted to do was get on your bike.' You wouldn’t think like that if you didn’t want to do it any more.
“I watched Adam Peaty last night and the way he reflected on his build-up, and he said he hasn’t really felt the spark in training and competition for the past two years, and that feels very much like me. When Adam said yesterday, ‘You’re putting yourself through this 24/7,’ that’s not a normal thing to put your brain through.
“Last night, I honestly had to just be like, ‘This could be it. This literally could be your last bike race. You need to fight for it and you need to make sure that if this is, you need to go out with a bang.’ And I can’t do that day in, day out. I can’t physically gee myself up like that every day.” Between them, Kenny and her husband Sir Jason – who augmented the phalanx of photographers with his smartphone at the medal ceremony – have stockpiled more bullion than Fort Knox.
But after a winter of unimaginable heartache, with a miscarriage last November followed by emergency surgery following an ectopic pregnancy two months later, she conceded this triumph may have been the sweetest of the lot. A familiar roar, cascading down from the packed Lee Valley VeloPark tribunes where she first won Olympic gold 10 years ago, felt like rocket fuel as Kenny reeled in flying Scot Neah Evans' attempted break, and when she crossed the line.
Until her glorious encore, Team England had been in danger of finishing the track cycling programme without a single gold medal, their worst performance since Delhi in 2010. But when the chips are down, there ain't nothing like a Dame. “In many ways, this is my best win. Honestly, I can't tell you how I felt last night. I just lay with my mum and I didn't know what to do.
“I didn’t know whether I could even put myself through this. it’s just so hard. It is hard enough coming in, Olympics after Olympics and getting yourself ready, without the whole rubbish stuff of your personal life. To have to come through all of that and then to try and step up in front of a home crowd. Yeah, in a way, I’m more proud of that than many of the other Olympic medals that I’ve won.
Team England's day was further boosted by Sophie Capewell's silver in the women's keirin, a brave ride after she lost her father last year. The strains of Jerusalem, the English national anthem, during the medal ceremony for Kenny's gold brought tears as it reminded Capewell of a hymn at her father's funeral.
