Cycling: Kenny gears up to be first on the road to London

Other Sports

Youngster is an important spoke in British Cycling's Olympic wheel of fortune. Mike Rowbottom reports

Friday, February 23, 2007

Olympic angst is not hard to find within British sport, whether generated by the rapidly approaching Games in Beijing or the challenge looming four years beyond them in London.

While the centrepiece Olympic event of athletics in particular frets over its ability to deliver medals, other sectors of the domestic sport are operating with far greater confidence.

So smooth, indeed, is the progress of British cycling that you might almost think it was freewheeling. But this is a sport which has earned its clear run with a meticulously planned talent identification scheme which has followed the dizzying successes at the Sydney Olympic Velodrome in 2000.

That cascade of medals established cycling as one of the most high yielding British Olympic sports, and given the success-driven nature of Lottery funding, it bankrolled development which led to more medals won in Athens 2004.

There will doubtless be further reasons to be cheerful at the season's concluding World Cup event which runs at the Manchester Velodrome for three days from today. And nothing is calculated to make British cycling more cheerful right now than Jason Kenny, whose family home in Bolton is only half an hour's drive from the venue.

Amir Khan may be Bolton's most famous sporting son of the moment, but this quietly spoken 18-year-old has already started to make a name for himself having won three titles at last year's world junior championships in Ghent, and he looks ready to provide British cycling with further glory in the course of the next 10-15 years.

Kenny will contest the sprint and the Team Sprint this weekend on the track where he made his first foray into the event as a sports-mad 11-year-old inspired by the efforts of Britain's Olympic cyclists in Sydney.

He has made an impressive transition to senior racing in the past three months, having competed in the Team Sprint at the World Cup event in Moscow before Christmas and made his individual debut in the sprint at the following World Cup in Los Angeles last month, where he finished a highly creditable fourth - but was still, in his own words, "gutted".

Kenny has a winning mentality which stems, partly, from training regularly with a group that includes Olympic and world champions such as Jason Queally and Chris Hoy.

"I've never been one to be in awe of people, but when I first started cycling Jason had won a gold in Sydney, and so I guess he was the one that I noticed and thought 'that's where I want to be'," Kenny said. "Now I train with him on a daily basis, which is amazing when you think about it."

Kenny was snaffled up by British Cycling's Talent ID scheme and now finds himself among the first intake of the Olympic Sprint Academy that was created in November last year under the direction of coach Iain Dyer, unfurling in front of a new generation of British cyclists like a magic carpet.

"I think we now have the best youth development cycling programme in the world," said Dyer. "Jason is in the first intake of the Olympic Academy, but if you look at the age group below him you can see riders coming through who are capable of reaching the same level.

"Jason has got all the physical qualities there and now he has to build up his experience. Every time he goes to a different venue or faces a different opponent it will lend itself to different tactics, so the next few years are going to be a massive information-gathering period for him. The plan now is to get in as much racing as possible."

This weekend's action will provide Kenny with new data to process - but he knows that if he performs well he may also earn himself the third sprint selection place for the World Championships in Palma, Majorca, from 23 March to 1 April along with likely choices Ross Edgar and Craig MacLean.

Making the Beijing Olympics will be tougher - fewer places will be available - but the London Games are clearly marked on his route map. "London 2012 has always been the goal since I started in the Talent scheme," he said. "It's always there."