Baby heartache left me feeling so alone but now Jason and me are back on track, says Olympic legend Dame Laura Kenny

6 months ago 76

CYCLING great Dame Laura Kenny has faced huge pressure on the track – but Britain’s greatest ever female Olympian has also suffered two pregnancy heartbreaks.

Now the 32-year-old reveals how her seven-year marriage to fellow rider Sir Jason Kenny — our most decorated Olympic athlete — has been a roller-coaster of challenges.

But three months after announcing her retirement from cycling, mum-of-two Laura reckons she is finally living her best life.

She says: “I’m so unbelievably happy. It’s funny because everyone says to me, ‘Do you miss it?’

“All I’ve dreamt of for so long is to be at home with the family and the kids and to have no other worries.

“At the minute, honestly, I’m so happy with how life is panning out.”

But life has not always been so blissful for the five-time Olympic gold medal winner, and juggling her sport, motherhood and marriage has been far from easy.

Despite being “soulmates” with 36-year-old Jason — who retired in 2022 after winning seven Olympic golds over his career — Laura admits there were days when simple disagreements would see them not speak for hours.

Laura, who lives in Cheshire with Jason and their sons Albie, six, and 11-month-old Monty, says: “For me it’s funny, because when I say I talk a lot, when it comes to an argu-ment with Jase, because I know it winds him up, I just stop talking.

“I’m just like, ‘No, I’m not biting, I’m not talking’.

“And it will go on for a day where we haven’t spoken, and to the point where it wasn’t really productive.

“So we agreed that he wouldn’t go mental and I would open up and say what the issue is. And yes we’re still arguing, but it wasn’t like one person just getting their point across and the other ignoring them.

“We had to get to a point where we had to meet in the middle on how we wanted to resolve our issues.”

Laura shocked the cycling world in March when she unexpectedly quit the sport just months before she was expected to be competing at July’s Paris Olympics. She will now instead be pre- senting for the BBC on TV.

Now she has opened up about her life, in an interview for the High Performance podcast, to be released this week, and offered an insight into how she and Jason, two fiercely competitive super-athletes, somehow manage to live under the same roof.

She says: “It’s funny — you wouldn’t think it would work, because as an athlete you’re so selfish it’s unbelievable. But Jason and I, we couldn’t be more yin and yang if we tried. I don’t shut up, he barely says a word. But that just works.”

Secret romance

Laura, a 5ft 4in flying machine has also won seven world championship golds, as well as 14 European and two Commonwealth.

She says of how she and Jason both approached their careers: “There were so many things we agreed on when it came to high performance. We would do very little at weekends, we would say no to anything like parties, birthdays, get-togethers, whatever.

“Yes, we cared for each other, but the only thing that really mattered was winning gold medals. And the biggest thing for us, and it was actually Jase that kind of set the rules, he said, ‘When we’re going to the velodrome, we’re professionals and we’re colleagues and then everything outside is we’re in a relationship.

“I would never have thought of it like that. I would have been acting like you do at home, but I would just have been a bit more friendly with him.”

Even when they started dating before the London 2012 Olympics they kept their romance a secret, to avoid any distraction.

Clearly their professionalism paid off, and in 2022 Laura was made a dame while Jason was knighted.

They married in 2016 and had Albie the following year. But Laura then endured heartbreak as she tried to conceive a second child.

In 2021 she suffered a miscarriage, then just months later lost another child to an ectopic pregnancy, which led to her having a fallopian tube removed.

Laura tells the podcast the struggle to have a second child became an obsession which also changed her personality. She says: “I cannot tell you how low I felt for 18 months, with this desire to have another baby, and it consumed me.

“It was the first time Jason said to me he’d seen me change. I could see my personality — sad, upset — because I’m not like that. I’m like this bubbly person.

“I knew that my every day was, ‘Am I going to be pregnant?’ I just felt so alone.”

She relied on Jason as her rock, saying: “I spent so much time being like, ‘Oh, well, Jason will make it better.’ I don’t think I realised until afterwards how much pressure I was putting on him for that. No one ever asks how the males are.”

It was only when she finally became pregnant with Monty that she truly began to grieve the children she had lost before.

‘Ultimate goal to win’

Laura says: “I remember being in the kitchen and I just burst out crying. I was obviously so happy, like so ridiculously happy.

“But there was a part of me that felt so sad for everything I’d lost in the past.

“The miscarriage was one thing, the ectopic was another level of scariness, and I never really processed that because all I ever wanted was another baby.

“I almost didn’t give myself time to process it because I went into the athlete mindset of saying, ‘Well, what can we do?’.”

Now, Laura is happily preparing for her new challenge as a presenter at the Paris Olympics, and unsurprisingly she is preparing with the same dedication she showed to her cycling.

While the star is happy to have now hung up her cycling gear, she looks back on her glittering career with nothing but joy.

She says: “I wouldn’t change it for the world, but there are so many ups and downs you go through.”

Yet despite her and Jason’s huge success, Laura is unsure if she would ever want their kids to follow them into competitive cycling.

Laura says: “Everyone always says to me, ‘Do you want your kids to be involved in sport?’

“Don’t get me wrong, everything that cycling has given me has been brilliant, but I also know how tough it is — and at those bad times when all the pressure is on you, do you want that for your child because it can be so unbelievably intense at times.”

‘I didn’t celebrate anything’

Reflecting on how her own child-hood was affected by the relentless demands of training and competition, she recalls: “I would miss parties, proms — you name it, I missed it.

“I didn’t celebrate anything because my ultimate goal was to go and win gold medals.”

Laura, who was sometimes even physically sick with nerves, adds: “I just think, I can’t imagine putting that on my child.

“And when I look back, I do think, ‘Wow’, to come out the other side of that takes a certain kind of mentality — to be able to get on the start line and perform like that.”

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