TROTTS: Now we want 2 more golds – to make a clock!
Before settling back to village life in Cheshire, an encounter with Britain’s golden couple to melt your heart...
EYES wide with excitement, Laura Trott is describing how she slipped her hand under the pillow when she woke, feeling for the gold medal she’d won the night before, just to check. ‘It was the same sort of feeling I used to have as a child on Christmas Day. I sort of blinked and had to remind myself that it was all true. I’d trained so hard for four years.
‘It was an amazing feeling – for me and for him.’
‘Him’ is, of course, Jason Kenny, Trott’s fiance, who won his sixth Olympic gold in Rio to join Sir Chris Hoy in having more golds than any other GB athlete. Between them, Kenny and Trott have ten gold medals. There are major nations with fewer. They are the most successful couple in Olympic history.
‘But I need more,’ says Trott. ‘I’d like two more then we could make a clock. A clock made of Olympic gold medals would be good, wouldn’t it?’
Of course it would. But until Tokyo in 2020 she’s going to have to settle for keeping them in the sock drawer. ‘I won’t have them long because mum doesn’t let us look after them,’ she says. ‘She doesn’t think we’re responsible enough. Which is probably true! She’ll take them and keep them safe for us.’
Laura Trott skips into the room in a Team GB tracksuit, showing off her painted nails. ‘Glittery Union Jacks,’ she says proudly. The power she generates on the bike is colossal but, at 5ft 3in, the woman herself is as slight as a gymnast.
We are meeting in Rio’s athletes’ village. ‘It’s like a bubble, away from the real world,’ says Trott. ‘We don’t really know what’s happening outside the bubble. We don’t know whether people are watching.’
I explain that people were indeed watching …10 million watched Kenny win the keirin. Her eyes widen. ‘They delayed the Ten O’Clock News for the race,’ I add, and she grips my arm. I say pictures of her and Kenny kissing are on the front of every national newspaper and she emits a high-pitched squeak, putting her hand over her mouth in disbelief.
The pair were based in flats opposite each other as Olympic rules prevented them sharing, but Trott says they saw each other every day.
‘I leaned on Jason a lot. When I was tired, fed up or nervous, he’d be the first person I’d talk to. Jason is quieter than me; he’s much more selfcontained whereas I’m way more out there. We’re completely different in loads of ways, but that’s why our relationship works. Part of every medal I’ve won belongs to him.’
Trott says that after her win in the omnium, she felt she couldn’t celebrate properly until Kenny had finished. ‘I knew that however he did, we’d both celebrate my victory, but I also knew how hard he’d worked, and how much this all meant to him, and how brilliant it would be if we both achieved what we set out to achieve, so I finished and just paced around, waiting for him to race.
‘When he won as well it was the most amazing feeling ever.’
By the time the medal ceremonies were over and they had been through doping control, it was 9pm when they arrived in the village. ‘Too late for McDonald’s,’ says Trott. ‘I hadn’t had a McDonald’s in four years and was really looking forward to it, but it was too late so we just had pizza and sat in bed talking.
‘You think that if you’ve just won a gold medal, all you want to do is party, but all I wanted was food and bed.’ Kenny agrees: ‘We’re not great party animals anyway. You can’t be when you’re a sportsperson.’
Trott, 24, and Kenny, 28, met in 2010 when Trott moved from Hertfordshire to join the British cycling team at the Manchester Velodrome.
‘I was being friendly to everyone but he was never at all friendly to me. I didn’t take to him at all,’ she recalls. It wasn’t until a night out after the 2012 World Championships that she realised she liked Kenny, and he was shy rather than rude.
A year later they were dating seriously, and Kenny proposed as they watched the EastEnders Christmas special in 2014. He showed her a brochure of cheap, plastic engagement rings and asked which she wanted. ‘They were really horrible,’ says Trott with a giggle. ‘I thought, “What are you doing?” Then I realised he was joking.’
In the end Kenny gave her a diamond ring that he designed. ‘That was a special moment,’ she says. ‘G ‘Gold medal-winning special.’
N Now the pair own a cottage just ou outside Knutsford, Cheshire, w which they share with t wo sp springer-poodle crosses – Pringle an and Sprolo – and are planning to ma marry at the end of the year. Trott sa says only the venue has been chosen so far – organising the wedding is h her next big project. ‘I had to get the Olympics out of the way before con concentrating on it,’ she says.
S She will take some time off now –a– after London 2012 she went str straight into training and regretted i it. ‘I train twice a day, every day, for around six hours and it’s hard. I really need a break. The thing people don’t realise is that it hurts so much. It’s like people are standing on your legs and crushing them.’
They only have Sundays off, when Kenny cooks a roast dinner. Trott says if the cooking were left to her they’d eat pasta every day.
‘Everyone laughs at Laura’s cooking,’ says her mum, Glenda. ‘They tell the story of the day she burnt a potato in the oven because she put it on grill instead of bake. There was smoke everywhere.’
It was Glenda who got her daughter into cycling. She needed to lose weight, having grown to a size 24 (today she’s a size 8). Trott went along and loved the sport. ‘It was a real turning point in her life,’ says Glenda. ‘Laura was born six weeks premature with a collapsed lung, and spent the first weeks of her life in intensive care, then as a child she suffered serious asthma. I didn’t know whether she’d survive when she was a baby. Then she was so sickly when she was a child. I was always really worried about her.’
Today Trott has an acid reflux problem that left her being sick into a bag after the individual pursuit in the omnium. ‘What I really love is that she’s done everything her own way,’ says Glenda. ‘She’s so natural and down to earth and even though she’s tough and competitive on the track, off it she’s very, very girly.’
Even Olympic training had a distinctly girly feel, with her manicurist joining the training camp to make sure the female cyclists looked as good as possible.
Trott says Kenny indulges her girlish side. ‘He’s good now, he knows what sort of things I’ll like. He bought me some lovely Christian Louboutin sandals with a heart on them.’ Questions swirl over whether they will start a family and, if so, would she go back to competing?
‘I’m definitely competing in 2020 but I’d like to have kids afterwards, and I’d like to be a full-time mum, so I probably won’t come back after that. I’d like to have kids when I know my career is over and it’s definitely not over yet.’
Now she plans to walk the dogs and go ice skating. ‘I just want to get back to being Laura the woman, not Laura the cyclist for a little while,’ she says. ‘Though Laura the cyclist will be back soon because Laura the cyclist has still got lots to do.’
Laura Trott is the ambassador for the Always #likeagirl campaign, inspiring girls across the country to stay confident and keep playing #likeagirl
P Part of every m medal I’ve won belongs to Jason I didn’t know s she’d survive when she was a baby