Dame Laura Kenny's heartbreaking admission as she announces she's pregnant
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Posting a video on New Year’s Eve of their boys Albie, seven, and Monty, one, wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan, ‘I’m going to be a big brother to a baby,’ Dame Laura Kenny wrote: “2024 was wonderful, 2025 is going to be even more special.”.
The announcement came just as Laura - who suffered a miscarriage in 2021 and an ectopic pregnancy, when the egg implants outside the womb, in 2022 - revealed her fears that elite sport could have damaged her fertility. "Was my body just running on empty, and then it said, 'Well, hang on, there's no way we can do this?'" she said. “Every training session, I went in there to give 100%, every race I went in there to give 100%. I took it to the limit - if I wasn’t sick after a race I’d be like, ‘Did I try hard enough?’”.
Olympic swimming champion Rebecca Adlington, who has miscarried twice, has also talked about her fertility struggles as an elite athlete. She said: “As an athlete, I’m very in tune with my body. I feel like I know my body quite well. There was nothing there that showed I’d had a miscarriage. That was a frustrating thing as an athlete, because I was like ‘I should have known,’ because I know my body so well.”.
Two-thirds of female athletes experience interrupted periods - particularly those taking part in endurance sports, according to a recent study by a combination of respected gynaecological and fertility experts. This compares to between 2 and 5 per cent of the general population.
