Dame Laura Kenny is showing us a photo on her phone. Looking radiant in a yellow Jenny Packham dress, she is standing outside Windsor Castle with her husband, cyclist Sir Jason Kenny, and their four-year-old son Albie, after receiving her damehood.
“Deep down I wanted it to be Prince William if I could pick any royal other than the Queen,” says Laura, still giddy from the ceremony last month, in which Jason was also knighted for his services to cycling.
“Will said he’d seen my Instagram post about my miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy. I wasn’t expecting that.”
The five-time Olympic gold medallist was back on top of the podium in April at a cycling championship in Derby, for the first time since bringing home gold at the Tokyo Olympics in August 2021. It was a bittersweet moment because Laura and Jason had been trying for a baby, knowing her maternity window was tight should she want to compete at Paris 2024. The day after they got back from Japan, the 30-year-old came off the pill and the couple were overjoyed when they discovered Laura was pregnant a month later.
Laura (née Trott) and Jason, 34, kept the news to themselves. They intended to announce the pregnancy after 12 weeks, when the risk of miscarriage falls significantly. It meant that in November, when she suffered her miscarriage at nine weeks – as Laura revealed in that heartbreaking post referred to by Prince William – she had nobody to turn to other than Jason, who was also lost in grief.
“I was due to fly out to Majorca to commentate for Eurosport and started bleeding the night before,” recalls Laura. “I called my midwife, who reassured me that some women bleed through the whole of their pregnancies. Stupidly, I convinced myself to get on the plane. Jason begged me to reconsider and asked if he could come with me and I told him no. But after I left, the bleeding got worse and worse.”
The next day, Laura was on her feet commentating. Her stomach pain was excruciating and she was forced to confide in a cycling friend, who took her to hospital. She had an internal scan and was told she was four to five weeks pregnant, which she knew wasn’t possible. “They just looked at me like a young girl who got her dates wrong and sent me home.”
After three days apart, she was reunited with Jason and Albie at their home in Knutsford, Cheshire, where she passed the baby later that day.
“I had 10 minutes of being in absolute agony,” she says. “I was bleeding at an unbelievable rate then my stomach really started to hurt and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, I think I’m actually going to pass the baby’ – and then I did. It was horrific.”
Despite one in five UK pregnancies ending in miscarriage, stigma around baby loss is rife, with many women feeling guilt, as though it’s their fault, and therefore they suffer in silence.
“It took me a long time to process the grief. We always said that whenever our dogs die we will bury them under a tree in our garden. We did that with the rabbits recently and that made me feel better, so Jase was like, ‘Why don’t we get a tree for the baby?’ He said he thought it would make me feel better. So when I got back home one night, he’d got me a little angel and a rose tree in memory of our baby. It did help me move on.”
The couple, who married in 2016, pulled through their grief to take Albie to Lapland in December, but were under pressure if they wanted to try again.
Laura’s cut-off date was 1 January, after which she felt it would be too late to have a second child before the 2024 Summer Olympics. “My period came on 1 January and it felt like fate,” she says.
What Laura didn’t know was that she was pregnant again – but the pregnancy was ectopic. “I started to feel really unwell on 7 January,” she explains. “Jason and I both had Covid but my symptoms were really bad. The next day, I took a pregnancy test just to rule that out as a reason – and it was positive. That’s when I knew something was terribly wrong and we went straight to A&E.”
A scan confirmed the ectopic pregnancy. “They took me off for a blood test,” says Laura. “They were looking for the pregnancy hormone HCG and mine was through the roof, meaning I was way further along than I anticipated – I was seven weeks. They said it was an emergency as it was rupturing my fallopian tube. I was going to be next on the operating table.”
Laura had keyhole surgery to remove the ectopic pregnancy but doctors weren’t able to save her fallopian tube.
“It means it’s harder to get pregnant naturally but doesn’t halve your chances because the other fallopian tube will realise it needs to catch up,” she says.
Laura hopes that by sharing her story she can provide comfort to others who have suffered baby loss.
“When I started racing again, it felt like the right time to tell people, so I wrote a post saying my victory had not been without its struggles. 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.”
Do you have a story to sell? Get in touch with us at webcelebs@mirror.co.uk or call us direct 0207 29 33033.
