Keirin king Kenny joins Hoy on six Olympic golds

While Mark Cavendish will be placing a first Olympic medal in his trophy cabinet following silver in the omnium on Monday night, Jason Kenny and his fiancée Laura Trott will have to build a special showroom to display all their gongs.

The couple, who got engaged on Christmas Day in 2014, won’t need to swap bands of gold when they get married later in the year – they could just exchange gold medals instead!

Kenny joined fellow cyclist Sir Chris Hoy as the only British athlete in history to strike Olympic gold six times by claiming victory in the keirin last night. Meanwhile Trott became the first British woman to win four golds by retaining her omnium title. 

If the couple were a country they would have been 13th on the Rio 2016 medal table this morning with five golds between them, above the likes of host nation Brazil!

If the couple were a country they would have been 13th on the Rio 2016 medal table this morning with five golds between them, above the likes of host nation Brazil!"
Tony Upfold, Cycling UK

Trott, who scored 230 points to win the title by 24 from American Sarah Hammer, couldn’t hold back the tears as she told the BBC: “I can’t believe it. I’m just so happy that it all came together. I didn’t expect that at all.”

She then watched anxiously as Kenny’s keirin final had to be restarted twice because of infringements. Riders appeared to overtake the rear wheel of the electric ‘derny’ bike, which sets the pace in the early laps, before it had left the track. There were no disqualifications on either occasion – which was a relief to Kenny, who looked marginally at fault when the race was stopped first time and faced and lengthy, nail-biting wait before the judges gave their ‘not guilty’ verdict.

Kenny has now helped Britain win the team sprint at the past three Olympics, as well as claiming two individual sprint titles and now his first keirin crown. Matthijs Buchli of the Netherlands took silver and bronze went to Malaysia’s Azizulhasni Awang.

After watching her fiancé win his sixth gold, Trott tweeted: “Arghhhh!!!!!! I love him to bits @JasonKenny107 !! Our kids have to get some of these genes right?!”

Kenny said: “It feels like a dream. I’m proud to be part of the team’s Olympic success and doing my bit. It is pretty mad matching Sir Chris Hoy. I was there in Beijing in 2008 and knew he was special and as the years have gone by I appreciated how amazing he was. To do the same is incredible.” 

Adding to the GB tally on the final night in the velodrome, Becky James won silver in the women’s sprint, with Katy Marchant taking bronze. 

Their successes came 24 hours after Mark Cavendish had ended his long wait for an Olympic medal. The man who boasts four world titles on the road and track, plus a British record of 30 stage wins in the Tour de France, finally realised his ambition by taking silver in the omnium – but not without sparking controversy in the final event, the 160-lap, 40km points race.

The 31-year-old Manxman admitted he was at fault as he collided with South Korea’s Sanghoon Park, which led to three riders – including eventual gold medallist Elia Viviani – coming off their bikes with 109 laps to go.

The incident put Cavendish’s medal in doubt but the result stood because none of his rivals submitted a protest that could have resulted in him being disqualified.

Italy’s Viviani won the six-discipline event, held over two days, with a total of 207 points, with Cavendish on 194, two clear of Denmark’s defending Olympic champion Lasse Hansen.

Cavendish’s silver vindicated his decision to pull out of the Tour de France with five stages remaining to concentrate on the Olympics – although the medal wasn’t the colour he was hoping for. 

He said: “I have got my Olympic medal. It is really nice but gold would have finished the collection. I did everything I could in the race. Elia was better across the six disciplines. He deserved to win that Olympic gold.”

Team GB had enjoyed a ‘Wow Weekend’ which kicked off with a magnificent performance from the men’s team pursuit quartet on Friday night, with Sir Bradley Wiggins, Ed Clancy, Owain Doull and Steven Burke beating Australia in the final.

In the process Wiggins, Britain’s first winner of the Tour de France, became the most decorated Olympian in the country’s history with eight medals – five of them gold.

The GB team broke the world record they had set 80 minutes earlier to overpower Australia in the final, coming from behind with 500 metres of the 4km race to go to post a time of 3min 50.265sec.

On Saturday it was the turn of Britain’s women to hit world-record form in the team pursuit, as Trott, Joanna Rowsell-Shand, Elinor Barker and Katie Archibald clocked 4min 10.236sec to beat the USA in the final. Becky James also added a silver in the keirin.

The weekend ended with what will now forever be known as Sensational Sunday, as Team GB celebrated their best-ever day at an overseas Olympics by claiming five gold medals – inevitably including one from 28-year-old Kenny.

The Bolton belter came out on top against compatriot and room-mate Skinner in the first two races to win the best-of-three men’s sprint final.

Britain’s first track gold of Rio 2016 came last Thursday night, when Kenny and Skinner teamed up with Philip Hindes to overcome New Zealand in a nail-biting men’s team sprint final. They crossed the line one-tenth of a second ahead of the Kiwis in an Olympic record time of 42.440sec.

Britain’s outstanding results on the track have been welcome after the disappointment of last week’s road races, when Chris Froome was the only rider to medal thanks to a bronze in the men’s time trial – little more than two weeks after he was crowned the country’s first three-time winner of the Tour de France.

Froome (31) finished more than a minute behind Switzerland’s Fabian Cancellara (35), the grand old master of time trialling, who repeated his gold-medal effort of Beijing 2008 in his final season as a professional.

Geraint Thomas, who had finished 11th in the road race after crashing near the finish, came in ninth against the clock.

The Rio 2016 time trial was all about the golden oldies, with American Kristin Armstrong – who was 43 last week – winning the women’s race for the third successive time. British hope Emma Pooley’s comeback ended in a disappointing 14th place.

The women’s road race was won by Holland’s Anna van der Breggen. Britain’s world champion Lizzie Armitstead – who had faced being banned for the Games after missing three drugs tests – finishing out of the medals in fifth place.

The road race course was heavily criticised, with horrendous crashes on the steep, slippery and narrow Vista Chinesa descent. Dutch rider Annemiek van Vleuten suffered severe concussion and three small fractures in her lower back after coming off at speed on a sharp turn while leading the 137km event.

Several men also came a cropper. Italy’s Vincenzo Nibali broke a collar bone when he took a tumble while leading the field, and British medal hopes disappeared when Thomas crashed on the final descent – after Froome and Adam Yates had failed to stay with the leaders. Thomas was still the best-placed Brit, finishing 11th in a race won by Belgium’s Greg van Avermaet.

Britain’s former Olympic individual pursuit champion Chris Boardman told the BBC: “I had a look at the course and saw those edges. We knew it was way past being technical – it was dangerous. The descent was treacherous.”

Cycling UK’s Membership Director, Matt Mallinder, who watched both road races and was commenting from our Cycling UK Twitter account, added: "They were good races – if you like cycling skittles.”

Just as well the likes of Froome, Wiggins, Kenny and Trott are otherwise engaged in Brazil. They would have struggled to hold their own in Cycling UK’s, er, star-studded Alternative Olympic Games (although perhaps O-limp-ics would have been a more appropriate title). Surely it’s only a matter of time before the IOC see sense and include the Cycling Egg-and-Spoon Race and Slowest Past The Post at Tokyo 2020…