Dame Laura Kenny felt her body "failed her" after she suffered a miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy within three months.
The cycling star says that women who are under 12 weeks pregnant shouldn't suffer in silence in the way that she did, and hopes that talking more openly will help with that.
“I see my body as a machine and it failed me for the first time in 11 years and that was hard to accept," Laura told OK! Magazine.
Laura and her husband Jason Kenny discovered they were expecting the day they got back from the Tokyo Olympics in August 2021.
The athlete, who had just won gold, was overjoyed as her maternity window was tight as she wanted to compete at Paris 2024.
The pair, who met at the velodrome before the London 2012 Olympics, decided to keep the news quiet until they passed the 12 week point - which is when the risk of miscarriage drops drastically.
Tragically, she lost her baby at nine weeks - but this meant that she had no one to talk to about her grief.
She was due to fly to Majorca to commentate for Eurosport, but alarm bells started ringing when she realised she was bleeding the night before.
The 30 year old called her midwife, who reassured her that some women bleed through pregnancies.
Feeling more at ease, she decided to board the flight.
She said how she was bleeding so heavily at the Track Champions League the following day, she was going through sanitary towels every 10 minutes.
But by the end of the day she was in so much pain that she opened up to one of her cycling friends and was taken to hospital.
She said that she had "tried to pretend that everything was fine", and still continued to commentate.
“I had no prior experience of miscarriage and I didn’t know any friends who had either. My mum only told me she’d had one after I told her what had happened," she explained.
Laura said how she had to tell her mum that she was pregnant, and that she had lost the baby in the same breath.
The couple, who married in 2016, worked through their heartache to take their four-year-old son Albie to Lapland for Christmas.
But with Laura's "cut off date" of January 1 looming, they wanted to try again.
She explained that pregnancy was "time sensitive" as her career only lasts "10 to 12 years".
She was devastated when her period came on January 1, meaning that she would have to wait until after the next Games.
But what she didn't know was that she was pregnant again - but it was an ectopic pregnancy.
She and Jason both had Covid at the time, but her symptoms worsened and she began throwing up and her temperature had soared.
Laura also said that she had "incredible" shoulder pain too, which is a symptom of an ectopic pregnancy.
She took a pregnancy test and discovered it was positive, but knew that something was really wrong.
The sports star said how she was on her own throughout the traumatic experience as Covid restrictions meant that Jason couldn't be by her side.
Laura, who was told that she was seven weeks pregnant, "went into full blown panic" as she signed forms that told her there was a chance she could die under anaesthetic.
She had keyhole surgery to remove the ectopic pregnancy, which is where a fertilised egg grows outside the womb, but doctors were unable to save her fallopian tube.
“When I was going through this I really struggled to find a platform where I could read that it was all going to be OK and this happens to a lot of people,” she says.
So she took to Instagram to share her story, which she was praised for by Prince William when she received her Damehood.
“The response I got was overwhelming – my Instagram went mental and I had thousands of messages from women and men who came to me saying they’d suffered in silence too. Six or seven athletes also came forward, which was comforting for me as I felt like less of a failure."
