Five-star Kenny joins the greats
JASON WINS ALL-BRIT FINAL TO EQUAL WIGGINS
MR Ordinary of Bolton is a fivetimes Olympic champion. Add Jason Kenny’s name to those of Sir Bradley Wiggins and Sir Steve Redgrave on the plinth of quintuple greats.
Mr Ordinary? Mr Extraordinary, in so many ways, for yesterday aged 28 he won his second title of these Games, the individual sprint, to go with the team sprint he had already banked. He won 2-0 without even needing a third and deciding contest against his fellow Brit and room-mate Callum Skinner.
And Kenny’s contribution to Rio 2016 is not over, with him favourite for the keirin. If he delivers tomorrow, he will be level with the great Scot Hoy, with whom he shares a birthday, 12 years apart, on six golds and one silver each.
Skinner could not live with Kenny. But he did conspicuously well to get into the final given his form at the world championships in London in March, when he was only eighth in the sprint.
But he had been marked out for years as the new Hoy. That is like being the new Ian Botham — the tag nobody wants and nobody can live up to.
The parallels are obvious. Both Hoy and Skinner come from Edinburgh. Both started their cycling at Meadowbank. Skinner was awarded the Chris Hoy Trophy for promising young cyclists. He was funded by the Braveheart Foundation, of which Hoy is patron.
And this week he took Hoy’s place as man three in a world-beating team sprint. And so on. But who was really playing the part of Hoy yesterday? Not Skinner, but Kenny. For this was a reversal of eight years ago in Beijing when Kenny was the pretender to Hoy’s saddle.
Hoy won 2-0 then, but here Kenny was the established man. The defending champion. And when Skinner turned his stare on Kenny at the start it made no impact at all. What a night it was again for British cycling, this being the fourth gold in the velodrome.
Everyone else is despairing. Even the Australians, whose chef de mission, Kitty Chiller, said: ‘How do you beat those British cyclists? Nearly every event they went in, there was a world or Olympic record.’
And what a remarkable record this is for the Kenny household. He and his fiancee Laura Trott are, by common recollection, the most successful Olympic pairing in history. So far their combined tally of golds is up to eight and, by the end of the week, it could be 10. She is yet to go in the six-part omnium.
Emil Zatopek eat your heart out. The great long distance runner and his partner Dana merely have five golds between them. But while Zatopek is better known in their relationship — the subject of recent books — Kenny is content to be the quiet half. He lives modestly without sponsorship, contenting himself with £65,000 in National Lottery funding, a decent salary but a relative pittance for a highachieving, short-lived career.
It is a case of Mr Extraordinary living as Mr Ordinary.
Meanwhile, Sir Bradley Wiggins has rejected claims that a culture of bullying exists inside British Cycling. The man who became arguably the greatest British Olympian when he secured his eighth medal, and fifth gold, in the team pursuit dismissed the claims of critics such as Jess Varnish, the rider whose accusations of bullying and sexism, made in Sportsmail, led to the resignation of technical director Shane Sutton.
‘This whole sexism thing, I’d never ever seen any sign of that, really,’ said Wiggins. ‘If I’m completely honest I think there are a lot of bitter people who didn’t make the grade, got the boot and they have now come out picking holes in things.’