How we cheated DEATH on road to GLORY
A collapsed lung. Terrifying blackouts. High-speed near misses... Laura Trott and Jason Kenny on surviving it all to be Olympic superstars
GOLDEN couple Laura Trott and Jason Kenny told last week how their love blossomed as they both achieved extraordinary Olympic cycling success. Today, in the second extract from their compelling and enchanting new book, Laura, 24, reveals the childhood setbacks that nearly ended her hopes of glory, while Jason, 28, tells how a reckless van driver could have shattered his chance to make history…
Laura writes... I STARTED LIFE IN INTENSIVE CARE
Born six weeks early and with a collapsed lung, I spent the first weeks of my life in intensive care at Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, Essex.
I had asthma from that point on, and never wanted to sleep again after all the time wired up in the confines of an incubator. I didn’t sleep through the night at six months, nor did I at a year. I would be nursery-school age before my parents, Adrian and Glenda, got an unbroken night’s sleep.
Dad remembers me having a perpetual cold or a cough, and that was the legacy of the asthma.
Because television didn’t work for me – I was too restless – it had to be physical activity. I had to be stimulated and amused.
The first thing I tried was Tumble Tots – like gymnastics for toddlers. That led to trampolining at the Grundy Leisure Centre in Cheshunt, which has since been rebranded the Laura Trott Centre.
The cycling came a year later: Dad took me, then aged five, and my older sister Emma, who was already on her bike and flying around, to Lee Valley Park. Even then it took a while for cycling to grab hold. Trampolining was my true first love.
TRAMPOLINING… AND LANDING WITH A BUMP
DURING a training session, rolling out the somersaults, one of the trampolining coaches spotted that I was badly out of position in mid-air. He tried to catch me and I nearly broke his arms, because I was a dead weight. I was out like a light, as if the batteries had suddenly failed. By the time I had hit the trampoline bed and bounced back up, I had come out of it, but the alarms were going off for those who had seen it and for those who heard about it.
A few months later, after arrivingg home from a swimming lesson, Dad was standing by the TV. I ran to cuddle him, as daughters do. The next minute I was sliding down Dad’s legs and narrowly missed cracking my head on our fireplace.
When I came round, I looked up at him and asked: ‘What happened, Dad? Did I just die?’
I was referred to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. I wore a crown of wires for 48 hours as doctors tried to work out what was going on between those two Trott ears. Nothing – or rather nothing they could find that explained the loss of consciousness.
While I was being studied and sent for other tests, the trampolining was off. No jumping around for six months. We never did find out conclusively what had happened.
The blackouts understandably terrified my parents. They had endured those setbacks with my struggles at birth, thought they were through them, had to cope with the asthma and constant illnesses, and now this – all that uncertainty was multiplied by the country’s top specialists holding their hands up and saying: ‘We’re really sorry, but we don’t know what’s caused it.’
I was a bad eater and I wouldn’t remember to drink during the school day, so it might have been sugar-outs – me out of fuel, my brain with no option left but to reboot. I had always been a fussy eater: baby food and nothing else until 18 months old, no toast fingers or carrot sticks or liquidised whatever Mum and Dad were having for tea.
The first thing I ate that was technically solid was on a family holiday to Portugal, and even then it was only crisps. Crisps, beautiful crisps. I can still polish off a family pack without noticing.
I ran cross-country in winter and middle distance on the track in summer. One year I went a whole season unbeaten – in the cross-country, and in the 800 metres and 1,500 metres on the track. The records still stand, but I knew I preferred cycling.
In the early days, however, I hated
riding in public because I didn’t want to pedal down the high street with my helmet on. Ironic, given how I would turn out, but at that time there was a little courtyard of shops off the street where all the so-called cool kids would hang out and they would shout at you as you went past.
I preferred the friends I was making through cycling to those I could make in school, anyway.
When I went back to school after wins, I used to think: ‘I don’t care what you lot think any more.’
FINAL CHANCE TO PROVE THE DOUBTERS WRONG
THE serious change came in 2007 when I was aged 15.
A few girls before me had been moved on to British Cycling’s prestigious Olympic Development Programme (ODP) a year early – sprinters Jess Varnish and Becky James were two. Jess would go on to win team sprint silver at the World Championships in 2011, and Becky the sprint and keirin golds in 2013.
At the National Track Champion- ships in 2007 I came second in the youth 500 metres, so I was duly moved up to the ODP.
I was trying a range of cycling disciplines, but riding everything badly. Becky beat me. Jess beat me.
At the end of 2008, head coach Iain Dyer sat me down at one of the track events and told me that I was going to be kicked off the programme. There were no tears and no tantrums. What upset me was what they offered me in its place – the mountain-bike programme. I had never done mountain biking.
It made no sense to anyone. So I phoned Helen Mortimer, a former downhill mountain-biker herself, who was then looking after the whole of the ODP.
I want a chance, I told her. I want a chance to show you what I’m actually good at.
She understood instantly. Within a day or two I was transferred to the endurance programme, and had a year to prove that I was worth the gamble.
Eleven years on, with more Olympic golds than any other British woman, I’d say the gamble has paid off.
But I am still just a girl who loves riding her bike – and I’m lucky to have found a boy who shares my passion.
Jason writes... I’M PERFECT... EXCEPT FOR THE DODGY HEART
My mum Lorraine says that I was born strong. Or at least that’s what she thought.
My brother Craig, who is four years older, struggled early on with asthma, but in my first eight months I had no asthma, no colds, no snotty noses.
But when Mum took me for my first full check-up with the nurse, I failed the hearing test, my head was apparently too big, and I also had a heart murmur.
As Mum was leaving, our health visitor waved at her and walked over. ‘How are you doing? I haven’t seen you for ages!’ Mum looked back at her: ‘When I brought Jason in he was perfect. And now…’
Craig was the talkative one. Like my mum, he would chat all day. But while I was quiet from the start, I was competitive.
Apparently, just before my first birthday I was drinking my milk from a bottle as usual when I noticed Craig was drinking his from a cup. I had to have a cup, too, even if I couldn’t use it properly – even if, when I was put back on the bottle, I had forgotten how to suck and couldn’t use that either.
Aged three I was in the back garden on my bike with stabilisers when I realised Craig wasn’t using any. Right. Neither would I.
We had a long lawn down the side of the house. Dad took the stabilisers off, Mum did the running up and down, pushing me and holding on to the saddle. When her back failed her, she went inside to do the washingup, only to look through the kitchen window and see me go sailing past. ‘Mum! I’ve done it! I can do it!’
Not all of my early habits were so indicative of a successful cycling career. I used to have a tendency to run into trees.
That was the point when Mum and Dad may have first suspected that I was a little shortsighted.
I sometimes wonder where I would be had cycling not arrived. At school I stayed on to do my A-Levels but drifted through, starting with maths, physics and PE, dropping physics after a year and finishing with two Ds. Pretty average. I knew I couldn’t stand being in an office so, if it hadn’t been for cycling, I would have done something physical, chosen a skill that would come in handy to other people as well as me.
My brother became a car mechanic, which has turned out to be rather useful for the family, so maybe I would have become a builder. I wouldn’t be unhappy doing it either. You fix the van, Craig, I’ll sort out your extension.
I am a contented man and not only because of my six Olympic gold medals. I will laugh at most things.
All the times we were getting beaten at big races, the British sprint squad developed a dark sense of humour. Laughing at how bad we were sometimes was the only thing to get us through.
It doesn’t matter how humiliating or depressing something is, eventually you can laugh at it – even if a little wince or lingering disappointment goes with it, too.
Not much makes me angry, not even drivers who try to run us off the road. When I lived in Manchester, I was so used to hopping on to the kerb to avoid stroppy taxi drivers that I could remain quite placid about it. But in the Cheshire coun- tryside, having your life put at risk because someone is unwilling to add ten seconds to their journey seems rather unnecessary.
People will pass you with a gap that starts at an inch and narrows as they accelerate away.
There are riders who have just taken up cycling who might not have the handling skills to stay upright, and there are professional track riders who might be about to win gold medals for your nation.
A week before the World Championships in 2016 I was nearly sent into a hedge. That would have been it: broken arm, world title gone because some numpty in a van didn’t want to deviate a foot from his chosen path.
There wasn’t even anyone on the road at the time – it was as if he was trying to prove or score a point by overtaking me as close as he could.
KEEP CALM – AND ALWAYS CARRY ON
ONE of the characteristics that defines me is that I make lots of mistakes but don’t tend to make a mistake twice. I am the same with my emotions. I worried once, found it did nothing to help, so decided not to do it again.
I got nervous once before a race and decided not to get nervous again. At some point in my life I would no doubt have panicked; having experienced that, I don’t panic.
It helps me. After the Olympics in 2016 I went racing at Brands Hatch in a borrowed car. It had been a few years since my last track day and I was rusty, not yet aware that my skills had taken a massive step back.
I tried to take a corner fast, way too fast. Massive spin, heading in rapid circles for the fence. I don’t want to hit the fence. Broken car, broken leg. I’m trying to sort it out, slow it down, and at no point during that frantic few seconds do I panic. Panic and you tense up and end in a far worse mess.
So I didn’t. I stayed relaxed and kept it out of the fence. Back to the pits, fresh underpants, tried again.
It’s the logic, always the logic. Being a six-time Olympic champion has given me a deep and rich satisfaction. If it goes wrong, it might seem like the end of the world to some. But my world will go on.