The low-key genius of The Incredibles

THE Kenny-Trotts were discussing what they would do with the 10 gold medals. There’s no trophy cabinet in their cottage in Chelford, Cheshire, no display case, no show at all really.

Great athletes are often like that. An 18-handicap golfer will have his nearest-the-pin prize from the monthly medal on his mantelpiece forever; Walter Hagen left the 1928 PGA Championship trophy in a taxi and didn’t get it back for two years. Gary Player did not travel with the green jacket he won at the Masters in 1961 when returning to Augusta a year later. Tournament chairman Clifford Roberts was most perturbed to hear it was still on a hanger in South Africa.

‘You like it so much, you fetch it,’ Player is said to have told him.

The 10 Olympic gold medals — plus one silver, like the runt of the litter — are kept at the bottom of a sock drawer by Jason Kenny and Laura Trott. Maybe they will find a special place for them when their time is done.

A clock was Trott’s suggestion. If they could win another two, they could have them set, as a clock. The way the pair are going, it may have to display a 24-hour face.

Trott will be 28 at Tokyo in 2020, Kenny 32. It is not unthinkable they may have another two Olympics in them. And here’s the irony: people like to think of them as a normal couple. Kenny went to the same school as comedian Peter Kay. Trott is from Harlow and sounds a little like Catherine Tate’s Lauren when she gets excited. But there the normalcy ends.

Unlike Lauren, Trott is bovvered. To a level that borders on insanity. She races harder and faster than any woman on the planet, and is then violently sick. And she has found her soul-mate in Kenny. There is nothing normal in that. There is mundanity in that they still have to go shopping, walk the dogs or make the beds like any other couple. Kenny proposed while Trott was in her pyjamas watching Eastenders. So far, so suburban.

Yet the rest of it: the extraordinary commitment to athletic intensity required to be the most successful female British Olympian in Trott’s case, and to equal Sir Chris Hoy’s record of six gold medals as Kenny has done, is as far removed from normality as is possible. Normal? They may as well be building a spacecraft down the allotment or tunnelling to the earth’s core through a hole in the floor of the garden shed.

The Kenny-Trotts are the most special, most competitive couple you could meet. There really is nobody quite like them, outside cartoon fantasy. They are The Incredibles.

Power pairings are uncommon in sport. Showbusiness, yes. The Brad Pitts, Jennifer Anistons, Chris Martins, Gwyneth Paltrows of this world. It is different for athletes; certainly those on comparatively modest government grants of £65,000 a year.

Even sport’s ultimate power couple never had to balance career peaks like the Kenny-Trotts. Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf started dating at the 1999 French Open, but Graf played one more tournament after that. By the time they married two years later, only Agassi was active professionally.

Tiger Woods and Lindsey Vonn split. So did Rory McIlroy and Caroline Wozniacki. Perhaps it helps that Kenny and Trott are both cyclists, so calendars and training can be synchronised — and they certainly spoke of the benefits of having a partner to help take the strain of an Olympics, but there will also be unimagined stresses.

British Cycling is still an office, after all, with office politics, gossip and jealousies. One only has to recall how fractured the atmosphere became over the Shane Sutton sexism row to see how a couple in a relationship may be drawn towards negativity. They could have friends on either side of the divide; their treatment by the hierarchy could attract accusations of favouritism. Kenny and Trott can only avoid this by always being the best.

To manage a private relationship, a professional relationship, to be successful beyond the wildest imaginations of even other elite athletes, to share bonds as competitors and also as soulmates — and to then make this all seem so everyday, is quite a balancing act.

What has shone through in Rio is their utter devotion to each other, and the sport. ‘She didn’t talk about anything else but cycling,’ said Trott’s mum, Glenda. ‘She still doesn’t now. That’s why she and Jason are so good. He’s just the same.’

By last night, Kenny was on his way home, returning early to prepare the house, Trott to follow a day later. She said they had a local in Chelford, but had never visited it, and were preparing to walk down there with the dogs. She made it all sound so dull. It isn’t, of course. It’s unique, a love story that transcends sport and will come to encapsulate this magnificent Games for Great Britain.

Mr and Mrs Normal? They’re not like that at all. Do normal folk get a clock face of gold medals? No, but The Incredibles do.

If their medals are set in a clock, it may need a 24-hour face