Jason Kenny’s exit leaves British cycling hopes resting on Laura Trott

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/feb/21/jason-kenny-cycling-laura-trott

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Early pratfalls for Olympic match sprint champions in key tournaments are by no means unknown, but when Jason Kenny was eliminated here in the first round by the Venezuelan Hersony Canelón it was a disappointing end to a world championship in which little has gone right for the double London Olympic gold medallist. Kenny and his team-mates finished eighth in the team sprint and he looked completely out of sorts in the keirin on Thursday.

Unless Kenny’s fiancee, Laura Trott, turns things around in the omnium on Sunday, Great Britain could leave this new town just outside Paris without a gold medal to their name.

They have tasted gold in at least one event every year since 2001, back in the days when Tony Blair was in his first term, Saddam Hussein was still in charge in Iraq and British success in track cycling was still a novel phenomenon which had yet to hit the national consciousness.

This is a different era, the pressures are greater and the sport has moved on. Canelón has notched up multiple medals in the Panamerican Games so he is far from a rank outsider, as was the case with the Irishman Felix English who put Sir Chris Hoy out of the European championships in Poland in 2010.

He had qualified 15th to Kenny’s 10th, meaning on paper the pair were closely matched for speed, and the Olympic champion had no answer when Canelón stole a march coming into the back straight to take the bell, and he was unable to get back on terms.

“I just fluffed it up,” said Kenny. “I took a bit of an opportunity to move to the front and that was OK in itself, but when I got to the front I thought: ‘What am I going to do?’ and I just got caught napping. The margins are so fine. I knew it was going to be close.

“The way the race went, we’d not had a fast race so we were both fairly fresh, and he’s only qualified a couple of hundredths slower, physically we’re pretty similar. It was just a case of who got it right and who got it wrong and he got it right unfortunately.”

To the outsider, Kenny does not look particularly focused at present but he has a deceptively sleepy manner which makes it hard to tell from a distance. He insisted: “It’s not concentration, perhaps you could say it’s a bit of confidence. It’s such a fine margin between being positively average in a race and getting walked all over, and being at the front and looking like a hero. It’s that split-second decision – do I wait, do I go over, do I go now, do I hesitate?”

With Kenny out, Trott is the best British medal hope for Sunday when Jess Varnish rides the keirin and Owain Doull – one of the strongest in the team pursuit on Thursday – and Mark Christian take on the Madison. Trott’s omnium campaign stuttered in the first event, the scratch, where she looked to be caught napping in the final two laps and ended up 13th. But she turned it round with a convincing win in the 3,000m pursuit to move up to seventh.

The evening closed with Trott’s party piece, the elimination, where she rose to the occasion in vintage style after some sticky moments early on take a clinical win, gaining valuable points on her key rivals, Annette Edmondson of Australia and Sarah Hammer of the US, who went out relatively early on.

That moved her up to third overall behind Kirsten Wild of the Netherlands and Edmondson. In Sunday’s flying lap, 500m time trial and points race the Olympic champion should have a strong chance of maintaining her consistent medal record of two golds and two silvers in Olympics and world championships since 2012.

What is probable, however, is that a lack of success here may mean that Kenny and his team mates may have to chase qualifying points next season, which could make it harder for them to achieve the perfect build-up.