It was a night of silver linings for Jason and Laura Kenny after the power couple of British Cycling were stunned by super-fast rivals during the defences of their Olympic titles. They took second place in the sprint and team pursuit respectively.
Jason, 33, becomes the most successful British Olympian, equalling Sir Bradley Wiggins’s medal haul of eight, while Laura, 29, must wait until later in the week to see if she can become the first British woman in history to take gold at three consecutive Games, when she rides in the omnium and madison.
The Kenny household is home to 13 Olympic medals: Jason has six golds and two silvers, while Laura has four golds and one silver.
The pair, who married after returning home from Rio in 2016 with a clutch of gold medals between them and have since welcomed their first child, Albie, saw their world and Olympic records fall on a sensational night in the velodrome. Both broke their records from Rio before seeing them obliterated by faster opponents.
Jason, alongside his team-mates Ryan Owens and Jack Carlin, was beaten by the hot favourites, the Netherlands, who set an Olympic record with a rapid time of 41.369 seconds.
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Laura — alongside Katie Archibald, also a gold-medal winner from Rio, and the new additions Neah Evans and Josie Knight — set a world record before Germany broke it minutes later. In the final, the British team were surpassed by the Germans once again, who set the final world record of the night, finishing in 4min 4.249sec. Great Britain were more than six seconds slower. Laura said she was “really proud of silver, just a bit disappointed”.
It is the first time in her career that she has not won gold in any Olympic event she has entered. She said she had gone “full gas” and could not have given any more. “We should be really proud of doing a 4:06, that’s really going some,” she said. “Right now, it just feels a bit disappointing that we didn’t get gold by doing so. We set our hearts on gold, we wanted to win gold, so we are going to feel disappointed.”
She said that, before these races, it was the first time her husband had ever told her he was nervous. “That kind of shocked me but then I saw him go off and break the Olympic record and I thought: ‘He’s not nervous,’ ” she said. “But he did say to me that he was going to struggle with three rides. He always said that third ride was going to be such an ask.”
Jason said that the rapid times clocked on the first day of action in the velodrome, when both GB team pursuit squads saw their records from Rio surpassed by several teams, had been the cause of the nerves. “I think it was because the team pursuits had been up and they were so dramatic yesterday,” he said. “It’s always a lot harder watching. Once we got in, we got warmed up and the flag dropped, it was business as usual really.”
The men said they were proud to have won silver. “We left everything out on the track with a PB, an Olympic record, although obviously that was taken quite quickly away from us,” Carlin said. “We gave it our all. If someone had told me before that we could walk away with the silver medal I would have snatched it.”
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Asked about his new status as the most decorated British Olympian, Jason joked that he had “limped over the line with a silver” but that he was pleased to have beaten Sir Chris Hoy. “I know it will annoy him; he’s probably going to make a comeback for Paris now,” he joked. “It is really nice, it is special.”
He denied that it was the end of an era for British Cycling, who, until recently, were undoubtedly the dominant force in Olympic cycling. “At the end of the day, we’ve always been on the right side of the few tenths [of a second] it takes to win and this time we were on the wrong side of it.
“We’ve got three years now to put the work back in and try to get back on the right side of that fine line.”
