Laura Trott and Jason Kenny - the Inside Track Pdf
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
FREE LAURA TROTT AND JASON KENNY - THE INSIDE TRACK PDF Laura Trott,Jason Kenny | 288 pages | 01 May 2017 | Michael O'Mara Books Ltd | 9781782437963 | English | London, United Kingdom Review: The Inside Track: Laura Trott and Jason Kenny | This is a perfectly normal response, and in some ways pleasing to know that British Olympians conform to equally British standards of formality and courtesy. If you are a member of British Cyclinghowever, it is a gesture fraught with foreboding. British Cyclists—the big 'C' denoting membership of the supremely successful group that has dominated the past three Olympic Games on the track—are supposed to try and avoid coughs and colds and the spread of diseases at all costs, such as by shaking the dirty hands of journalists. It is a marginal part of the philosophy of 'marginal gains' espoused by Sir Dave Brailsford, formerly performance director of British Cycling and now principal of Team Sky, the professional road-cycling Laura Trott and Jason Kenny - The Inside Track that has crunched a similarly detailed theory into four Tour de France victories in five years. Adding up the aggregates, the premise goes, leads to maximal performance gains in the events that matter: the Tour de France for Sky, and the Olympics for the track team. If this kind of exaction has worked for anyone—and it has worked for many—then it may have had the greatest benefits for Kenny and her husband, Jason they were married at the end of September; no press were invited. Trott is Britain's most successful female Olympian, with four gold medals. With records to beat or extend, they must surely be straining on leashes to compete again. The cramped basement of a London Laura Trott and Jason Kenny - The Inside Track seems a stifling environment for two finely tuned engines whose lives are spent thrillingly sweeping up and down the steep banking of a wooden cycling track. To draw such a conclusion may be to misunderstand the twilight world of the track cyclist, and the goals of the British Olympic programme. The clue is in the name. Funding via the National Lottery is used to support athletes with the best chance of winning Olympic medals, and the Olympics come around every four years. The Kennys peaked in Rio, Laura Trott and Jason Kenny - The Inside Track five golds back to their shared home in Cheshire. Is this the end with Rio or the start of the four-year road to Tokyo? Looking down a path whose twists and turns are yet to be constructed must be daunting. Coming off such a massive peak is the hardest part of it. Just thinking about laying foundations, so that if my mojo comes back—and hopefully it will—I'm in a good place to hopefully pick it up and put myself in a position to be competitive again. I feel like I'm a bit on the fence at the minute. A little less than six months out from the Worlds [World Championships, in Hong Kong in April], it's getting to the point now where we either pick it up and go for it or accept that it's going to be 18 months before my next World Championships. Et tu, Laura? I think people forget it's your life. Some people think you do four hours and then you have the day off. But it's a lifestyle. We don't go out shopping. We literally go home and lie down. It's having the commitment to that, and whether we are totally Laura Trott and Jason Kenny - The Inside Track to just go and get straight back into that lifestyle. Notice the "we. The relationship became public during Londonwhen they were photographed kissing at the beach volleyball on Horse Guards' Parade. Their new book, "The Inside Track," was a joint project. Sometimes when one is struggling for a response, the other will step in—usually the more voluble Trott for Kenny, who in real life is as he appears in the autobiography. Quiet, considered, less willing with his words than on a bike, wherein for distances of plus meters he is faster than any man in the world. There may be parallels with that other great sporting-celebrity couple, the Beckhams, not only because Trott is from Cheshunt, the same town as Victoria hails from, and David warned them of the voraciousness of fame on that August afternoon in Whitehall in The line that grows steadily outside the bookshop from 10 a. There are handwritten fan letters awaiting them; their address is private, but Trott says mail still turns up at home. Trott and Kenny are wholesome, suggestive of good health, vitality, and an unquenchable and admirable determination to reach the top and then keep climbing higher. In a world where narcissism can be petrol for Laura Trott and Jason Kenny - The Inside Track career in the public eye, and where footballers are splashed, sometimes bleary-eyed, across tabloid newspapers, their calmness in the shadow of staggering achievement impresses. In a year when millionaire and billionaire politicians managed to convince normal people of their normality, Trott and Kenny are genuinely normal, to me at least. In time, perhaps we will come to see the summer of as British Cycling's high-water mark. Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France, the first Briton to do so. Lizzie Armitstead won Team GB's first medal of the home games, a silver behind Marianne Vos of the Netherlands in the women's road race. Wiggins took gold in a staggering time-trial performance, splintering the challenge of German Tony Martin, nicknamed, onomatopoeically, the 'Panzerwagon. Trott set a record in the women's team pursuit, Kenny in the men's sprint. The fundamentals are the same. It's just about ticking the boxes. All the little things. We said it after Beijing, London, Rio—there's no one thing. The results have been the same—better, if anything, although Kenny and the track team endured a fallow period between London and Rio. On the road with Sky, Froome has won three Tours de France, including the last two in a row. Armitstead became road world champion in September The cast of players, though, has changed, and in some cases been tarnished. Brailsford left British Cycling to the care of Shane Sutton, Wiggins' Australian mentor who accepted so little nonsense that he was found culpable by a British Cycling investigation of making derogatory comments towards Jessica Varnish, a former member of the track team. Armitstead flew into Rio amid turbulence caused by three missed drugs tests. The first of those was struck out by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, allowing her to compete at the Olympics, where Laura Trott and Jason Kenny - The Inside Track delivered traumatic interviews and finished fifth in the road race. Then came the greatest jolt of all. An anonymous hacking group that called itself Fancy Bears began, in September, to publish athletes' medical data obtained by a phishing hack on the World Anti-Doping Agency WADAthe body set up to police clean competition in sport. One tranche concerned Wiggins' use of kenacort, a powerful corticosteroid banned in competition without a Therapeutic Use Exemption TUE — which Wiggins held, for pollen allergies. He received a shot of this before three major races: the and Tours de France and the Giro d'Italia. Sky and Wiggins deny any wrongdoing; Brailsford has accepted an invitation to speak in front of a Select Committee hearing into the affair on December Was Sutton missed when he was suspended in the crucial run-up to Rio? Everything was already in motion and there wasn't actually anything left to do. If you had an issue you'd pick up the phone to your coach. We go out on the track and do our best but we go better because everyone behind us is doing their best at their individual job. Friendship ties tighter than the brutal world of elite sport. Kenny bumped into Sutton in a pub in Cheshire, while Trott got a Laura Trott and Jason Kenny - The Inside Track luck' text on their wedding day. Given the nature of Sutton's alleged offenses, and the parity of attention given to both sexes on the track, it seems more glaring than ever that a women's Team Sky does not exist. I remember somebody saying the men's team should be forced into having a women's team run alongside it. I get the women's team doesn't need the men's budget, but if you're just going to do it halfheartedly I don't think it's good for the sport. The girls can then feed into a better squad rather than just throwing them in the deep end. The Golden Couple of British sport could not escape British Cycling's strange year of exorbitant highs and lows without scratches. The Fancy Bears got hold of Trott's TUEs, too, showing use of the asthma medications salbutamol and salmeterol permitted up until I needed it, whoever else needed it got a TUE. Because of the way it's been perceived in the media, that these TUEs are a really bad thing—I don't want the younger generation to get put off by that. The debate around transparency in sport, and particularly cycling, seems to send fans scattering to the poles in search of firm ground on which to argue. Either cyclists are all completely villainous, hiding treachery behind their appeals for privacy, or they are collectively victims of so-called "keyboard warriors" desperate for a sniff of scandal and willing to accept proof and confirmation bias as one and the same.