Why Laura Kenny’s legacy is greater than Olympic gold medals

On a January evening in 2022, Laura Kenny lay in her bath in agony. Sitting in boiling hot water was the only relief she could find from the intense pain. When it grew worse, so severe that she was ready to call an ambulance, her husband, fellow Olympic champion Jason Kenny, drove her to A&E.

There, Laura was left alone in a hospital bed while Jason stayed away under Covid protocols, as medical staff buzzed around her. A scan revealed an ectopic pregnancy, which can be fatal, and she was rushed to emergency surgery.

Kenny survived the dangerous episode, in which one of her fallopian tubes had to be removed, but it was devastating. The ectopic pregnancy occurred only two months after she had suffered a miscarriage, as the couple tried to have a second child following the birth of their son, Albie, in 2017. She sunk into a hole, her mind unable to stop thinking about what they had lost.

It would have been understandable if they had chosen to keep their darkest hours private. Initially they did, and Kenny even attended an event she had committed to commentate on, the Track Nations Cup, not long afterwards.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she later explained in a powerful interview with Eurosport’s Orla Chennaoui. “I do not like letting people down. I’d committed to everyone to be at this bike race commentating, and I just carried on being Laura.”

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Most people who go through similar trauma find it hard to talk to their closest friends, even their partner. But Kenny somehow found the strength to tell her story to interviewers in frank detail: the pain, the heartbreak, the desolation. How she felt so alone. How her world rallied around her but she worried her husband had no support.

“It was the first time that I seriously struggled with mental health and bringing myself back round from that. I [usually] pick myself up: I broke my shoulder, for crying out loud, and got straight back on my bike not even thinking about it – I don’t care if it’s hanging off, I’m a bike rider and that’s what I do. But my head wouldn’t pick me back up. I was broken.”

It was cycling that dragged her out of that place. For a couple of hours, she would ride away from her house and her brain would switch off, thinking instead about where she should go or how far she should travel. “I was free,” she said. “It wasn’t 200 thoughts in my head, it was a few, and it started to get to the point where Jase and I could talk about it.”

Of course, Kenny’s lasting legacy will be a sporting one. Here was the girl born prematurely with a collapsed lung, whose parents encouraged her into sport on the advice of a doctor to help regulate her breathing. She flourished on a bike and rose to stardom, becoming one of the faces of London 2012. She defended her titles in Rio and added another in Tokyo, becoming Britain’s most successful ever female Olympian with five golds and a silver – though somehow only the second most decorated athlete in her own house.

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Her romance with Jason Kenny brought plenty of extra attention, sparked when they were photographed kissing at the Horse Guards’ Parade while watching volleyball. That image, with David Beckham sitting in the foreground, became an iconic picture from that feel-good summer which splashed across the nation’s press: young love in the evening sun.

As an athlete, Kenny wrote history and then wrote some more. But off the track there was something special about the way she used her platform to spread a searingly honest story, and with it a deeply reassuring message. For anyone who has been through a similar experience, they may be familiar with that slightly guilty but ultimately comforting feeling in knowing someone else has felt the same pain. There is something validating in hearing our emotions articulated by someone else.

“I would sacrifice any Olympic medal to have those children that we created,” she said.

In January 2023, two years after lying in agony in her bath, Kenny announced she was pregnant once more. The anxiety was “unreal” and she “felt scared every single day ​that I might have to go through the pain of losing another baby”.

She added: “When I was lying in the hospital bed, I was searching for people’s happy endings because it was the only thing giving me any comfort at the time. That maybe, just maybe, I would get my happy ending.”

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That summer she gave birth to a second son, Monty. The announcement of her retirement on Monday was no great surprise: Kenny had increasingly felt torn about leaving her family for training camps and competitions, and she felt relief at finally making the decision to join her husband in racing retirement. “I always knew deep down I would know when was the right time. I have had an absolute blast but now is the time for me to hang that bike up.”

She will spend some cherished time with her family, but Kenny has a gift for finding the right words and it is not hard to imagine she will enjoy a new career in media or public speaking. For someone who is only 31, she has plenty of wisdom and life experience to share. Hers is even more than a triumphant sporting story.