First lady of the track Dame Laura Kenny has revealed she almost quit cycling after a miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy left her at “breaking point.”
Kenny, Britain's most successful Olympic athlete of all time, goes for gold in this week's Commonwealth Games after the love of her husband and fellow cycling legend, Jason, nursed her through the winter from hell. The couple had not expected her to compete at Birmingham 2022, but after her miscarriage last November Kenny needed emergency surgery to remove a fallopian tube two months later after suffering an ectopic pregnancy.
Remarkably, the five-times Olympic gold medallist is now planning to add to her solitary Commonwealth Games title (at Glasgow in 2014) in the team pursuit, scratch and points races at 'Pringle' velodrome which hosted the London 2012 track competition. Kenny, 30, said: “It was one thing after another, it felt like nothing was going our way at all – you couldn't make it up, and in January I was at breaking point.
“Without Jason, I would have just canned everything and said, 'I can't do this any more.' When I grabbed my safety blanket and said, 'I just need to ride my bike again' people were probably thinking, 'What on earth is she doing?'
“But riding is bike, for me, is home. That's what I've done for the last 13 years and it feels like a safe place. The obvious thing to do when I felt that sad and that broken was to go out and ride my bike again. It puts lots of things into perspective because I was really quite poorly and even seeing Jason, the way he was around me, made me realise my family was under so much stress.
“It made us realise cycling's one thing, but life is another and it brought us back to earth.”
Kenny is staying in airbnb accommodation near the velopark where she won her first two Olympic titles 10 years ago and realised the why it seemed so familiar. She said: “I've walked in and I've had serious deja vu thinking, 'This looks familiar, I've been here before.'
“And it was only when I spoke to the lady who's renting out the apartment, and she said it was the last block of Olympic (village) flats, that I realised it was exactly the same as our flat at London 2012. I just love it here – everything about it – even walking down the stairs, the smell brings back memories from 10 years ago, and it's always going to be my favourite track.
“I grew up quite close to this velodrome: I regard this as my home track.”
