DAME Laura Kenny – Britain’s most successful Olympian – has announced her retirement from Track Cycling, just four months before the 2024 Paris Olympics.
The 31-year-old won five Olympic golds and seven World Championship titles in a successful career on the track.
The five time medal winner was looking at heading towards her fourth Olympics in Paris this summer, but has now decided ‘the time is right’ to hang up her cycling shoes.
She was the first British Olympian to win three golds at three consecutive Games.
Kenny won the women’s omnium and team pursuit events at the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympics – no other British woman has won four Olympic gold medals.
She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2022 New Year Honours, for services to cycling before winning a second Commonwealth Games gold in the scratch race in Birmingham that summer, her last major honour.
Welcoming her first child, Albie, in 2017, she was determined to prove motherhood and the demands of sport can be juggled.
After having her second baby boy in July 2023, speaking to BBC News she realised “I always knew deep down I would know when the right time was”.
“I have had an absolute blast but now is the time for me to hang that bike up.”
Laura Kenny, BBC
Despite having a miscarriage in 2021 and an ectopic pregnancy just months later, their second son Monty was born.
A mum first and an Olympian second she explained to BBC Sport, “It’s been in my head a little while, the sacrifices of leaving the children and your family at home is really quite big and it really is a big decision to make…more and more, I was struggling to do that.”
Once I said to Jase, ‘I don’t think I want to ride a bike anymore’, I started to feel relief.”
Laura Kenny, BBC
