It's not everyday you meet a real life superhero, let alone have two in the same room at the same time.
Britain’s most decorated female cyclist Dame Laura Kenny needs little further introduction. On Tuesday, the five-time Olympic champion attended a charity luncheon on the top floor of the exquisite El Gato Negro Tapas in central Manchester.
The 31-year-old briefly cradled her bump as she entered the room, her second child on the way. Life has not been a smooth ride over the past 18 months and after hearing her journey through that time, there is no doubting that she is a true superwoman.
Meanwhile, the perhaps lesser known Professor Rob Wynn is an ironman in his own right for his 25-year heroics at Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital, where he is the Director of the Paediatric Bone Marrow Transplant Programme.
After cycling from London to Paris for charity in time for Liverpool FC’s Champions League final with Real Madrid 12 month ago, the 57-year-old is taking it up a gear this summer. He and 24 other amateur riders are foreshadowing the Tour de France by cycling the 3,500km circuit a week early.
He is raising awareness on behalf of Cure Leukaemia - the sport event’s charity partner - with the aim of helping children in Manchester gain access to a wide range of alternative cancer treatments should regular courses be unresponsive.
“Over 25 years I’ve seen a huge change in outcomes so that most children with leukaemia or having a transplant do get cured of their disease. But most isn’t enough,” he underlines.
“These next years are about how we can help cure all of the kids with leukaemia and those who need transplants. When I look at the world now, there are huge numbers of treatments and it’s about getting those treatments to individual children in better measures.
“The fundraiser is about accelerating clinical trials and bringing this treatment more rapidly to children in Manchester - I know there’s treatment out there and I want to open the trials in Manchester.”
Perching together on padded stools next to a pristinely polished bar, I got the sense of a gentle character who is utterly passionate about helping children whose lives are anything but comfortable. Rob had come from the ward that morning.
“I ask myself that every day,” he chuckles when asked about why he had selected to ride the Tour de France route.
“That course is designed to break professional cyclists... But I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t trying to raise both funds for the charity and for this purpose, but also to raise awareness of it. We need to finish this and cure all kids with cancer and save lives.”
Dame Laura is astonished by the feat Rob is set to carry out from June into July. “What he is doing is absolutely amazing,” she says.
“The Tour de France is pretty insane, right? Even for me, who rides a bike every single day, that is not a small task, trust me. It's incredible what he's doing.”
She has accomplished many feats during her career, both on and off the track. For this chat, we’re sitting at a table decked with name placards and other finery.
The event is being held by The Sporting Club, ran by former award-winning journalist Ian Stafford, whose contacts list is as long as it is exciting. His aim is to unite people through the common denominator of sport - “the world’s biggest niche”.
Later in the afternoon, Ian held a Q&A session with Dame Laura and interviewed Rob as well as former England footballer Geoff Thomas MBE, new British Cycling CEO Jon Dutton and Lancashire cricket captain Keaton Jennings with many other esteemed sporting figures in attendance.
“Sport itself has the ability to bring people together,” Keaton, an ambassador for Cure Leukaemia, told me. “When someone like Laura, who’s a five-time Olympic gold medallist and has achieved what she has in sport, and you get people like that recognising the effort, pairing that with a fantastic charity, I think you can achieve some really special things.”
Dame Laura was belatedly bestowed The Bidlake Memorial Prize, a prestigious award that recognises special achievements in cycling won by the likes of Sir Chris Froome, Mark Cavendish MBE and Sir Bradley Wiggins.
“It’s quite an illustrious award, some amazing people have won it before - a real celebration,” outlined Jon, who has officially only been in his role at British Cycling for two weeks having concluded his time as CEO of the 2021 Rugby League World Cup.
Back at that table with Dame Laura ahead of the presentation of the accolade - which she actually won in 2016 post Rio - the Olympian was delighted to be receiving the plaque.
“For me, any recognition for my career is obviously amazing. It feels lovely to be recognised for something that doesn’t seem like a job at all.”
The Essex-born athlete has been in cycling since the age of 13 and has been on a historic journey since. Five Olympic gold medals, seven World Championship titles, 14 European golds, a double-Commonwealth champion.
What is the key to all that success? “For me it's always been the enjoyment - I've always enjoyed it, I've never done it for the sake of doing it,” she says.
“I've always said the minute I didn't enjoy it, I'd stop because it is so much of your life, it is 24/7. It consumes you.
“I've always made sure if there's anything I'm not sure about, I either pull myself out of it or I speak to someone about how I feel. I think that's my biggest thing - for me, it’s being really open and honest with everyone.
“I think as an athlete, that's massively important because everyone knows where you're at because if you come in and you're in a bad place or haven’t slept very well, I'd come in and I'd voice that straight away. To me that's helped throughout my whole career.”
Dame Laura’s elder sister, Emma, was a professional cyclist too although the limited financial opportunities she had as a woman were far less frequent than those available today.
Laura experienced that herself early in her career but is thankful of the direction the sector is headed. “As a woman in sport, now it's getting better and better,” she says.
“I've been in it a long time now - when I first started things were very limited on what we'd get offered. So like sponsorships - the women's scene was nothing really in comparison to the men's.
“My sister was a professional on the road but she wasn’t getting paid to live off that. So it’s only gotten better throughout my whole career. It's brilliant that women's sport is just growing - it's hard to imagine it going backwards.”
In August 2021, Dame Laura became the most successful female cyclist in Olympic history when she and Katie Archibald claimed gold in the inaugural women’s Madison at the delayed Tokyo 2020 Games.
She became the first British woman to win three golds at consecutive games in the process, going level with equestrian great Charlotte Dujardin for the most Olympic medals won by a UK sportswoman.
The cherry on the cake came when she was selected to be the flag bearer for Team GB at the closing ceremony. But for an athlete whose life accelerated at a fast pace, her world jolted to a halt three months later.
Dame Laura suffered a miscarriage at nine weeks and then in January 2022, she underwent an operation amid an ectopic pregnancy.
She revealed her experiences the following April, admitting at the time that she would have been “broken” without the support of husband and seven-time Olympic cycling champion Sir Jason Kenny, and now five-year-old son Albie.
A home Commonwealth Games were just around the corner with Birmingham the host but seeing track cycling take place at Lee Valley VeloPark in London. However, deep down, it was the last place she wanted to be.
“The Commonwealth Games were pretty difficult. I didn’t really want to be there. If you'd have asked me what my ideal plan was, it was to have had another child by then,” she told me candidly.
“If I could change anything about my history, it would be having this baby a year earlier because it would have been one of the ones we had lost. So it was really hard to get back into training and almost pretend that I was OK and wanted to go to the Commonwealth Games.
“The Commonwealth Games were massive and it was in London! Everything in me was saying 'you want to be there' but every time I got on the bike I was like 'I don’t want to be here'.
“I was in the funny mindset of doing what I felt was right but not necessarily doing what was right for me. I just sort of stuck it out and was like 'it'll be fine'.”
On the first day, Team GB won bronze in the Team Pursuit. “It seemed on the outside like everything was fine but obviously I knew how I was feeling on the inside,” Dame Laura explains.
“The following day we did the points race and we did terribly, I think I came third from last. I didn’t score a single point which kind of says it all. The last day, I was like: If this is the last race you ever do, you need to go out with a bang and try your absolute upmost.
“Whether that be win or lose, you need to cross that line knowing you gave everything you had on that day.
“After all the comments saying I was past it and shouldn't have been there, I obviously had to look through that and think 'nope today is a new day', forget what everyone else is saying and go and race.”
Dame Laura went on to win gold in the Scratch race, an achievement made all the more phenomenal given what had happened during the previous months.
As we sit chatting, I notice how inspiringly comfortable she is speaking about such a tough period of her life, perhaps almost as if there is a small cathartic element about it. She admits she knew once she had gone public about her miscarriage that she would have to face questions about it.
She is one of the countless young women across the country who have gone through the heart-wrenching experience, many of whom feel afraid to talk about it. The decision for her to reveal such a personal tragedy takes guts and courage, traits she has shown throughout her career that have taken her to the heights of sport.
She says she was keen to use the platform she has earned to spread a simple message: “It's nothing to be ashamed of.”
Dame Laura added: “I don't know why so many people feel like it's something that they can't share. I do think it comes from a sense of insecurity, that we can't come out and say, ‘my body didn’t do what it was supposed to’ because that’s what it feels like.
“Certainly from an athlete's point of view, it was the first time I felt my body had let me down. As a woman, you're supposed to be able to grow and have a child - that to me is life, we're the ones who recreate.
“And all of a sudden it felt to me like I couldn't do that and it was a really weird mindset. But if I don’t share - and I've got a platform to share - then there's going to be so many other women who felt like I did in that hospital bed or felt like I did from the first miscarriage.”
Dame Laura was away from home and so was unable to have the in-person conversations that are so needed during such a time. “It felt so lonely and I felt so isolated, literally the only thing I had was google.
“But [afterwards] I just felt like if I sit there and don’t come out and just pretend that everything is OK, it doesn’t help anyone.
“When I came out and said it, I was nervous. You do have loads of negative thoughts about it. But the amount of stories I had after it for thanking me, and telling me their stories was just unbelievable.
“I didn't know when to announce it and it took a while for me to have the right words because I knew then people would question me about it. I had to be mentally ready to answer those questions I was going to get - I wasn’t pregnant at the time.
“I knew I didn't have my end result yet, so I had to make sure I knew I was ready, so I could put on a brave face and talk about it.” Dame Laura is expecting her second child this year.
The delay of the Tokyo Olympics amid Covid means the traditional four-year cycle has been cut to three. Despite this and the soon-to-come new addition to the family, Dame Laura is not ruling out an appearance at a fourth Games in Paris.
“I just think never say never," she says in a statement that epitomises her sporting mindset. "If I don't try I'll never know and I know a year seems insane but people have done madder things.
"If I don’t try, I won’t know whether I'll going to make it or not. I don’t want to look back thinking ‘what if I had tried’.”
And beyond 2024?
“I can only take it as it comes. I think life over the last 18 months has shown me that. If I don’t go to the Olympics then there's always a World Championships around the corner.
"For me, it would be about deciding then if I carry on to try again or whether I just go to another World Championships. It's just taking it one race at a time and see what happens.”
Relentless, courageous and inspiring - traits both Dame Laura and Rob have in spades, attributes that leave you inspired and in awe. I told you both are real-life superheroes.
To donate to Professor Rob Wynn's fundraiser, click here.
MEN Sport spoke to Dame Laura Kenny and Professor Rob Wynn at The C&C Insurance sponsored 'Dame Laura Kenny Charity Luncheon', held by The Sporting Club at El Gato Negro on King Street, Manchester.
