Meet the Britain’s golden couple of 2016 Rio Olympics

You might forgive Laura Trott and Jason Kenny for leaving Rio rather full of themselves. Five competitions between them, five golds won. As of Tuesday night, had the couple been a country they would have sat 13th on the medal table, above Jamaica, Kenya and Brazil.

That would be to misunderstand what makes them tick. This is a couple who got engaged while on the sofa watching an episode of EastEnders.

You might think too that it would get competitive around the breakfast table in the cottage they share just outside Knutsford in Cheshire. Kenny now has six Olympic golds from three Games, more than Sir Steve Redgrave and Sir Bradley Wiggins. Trott has four, more than any other British woman, and from one fewer Olympics.

That would be to misjudge their relationship. Cycling superstars on their own, together they can be almost ordinary, almost invisible. After the gold rush, after their tearful embrace in the Rio velodrome with the world watching on, that may be about to change.

“The difference in their characters is what makes it work for them,” says Trott’s father Adrian.

“Until he gets to know you, Jason is a little bit shy. He’s quiet and understated. Laura is bubbly, chatty, just as you see in her interviews.

“If they were both like Jason, God only knows how they’d talk about anything. And God forbid having two Lauras in a household!”

The relationship between the two began in the build-up to London 2012, with Kenny about to come out of Chris Hoy’s muscled shadow at his second Olympics and Trott about to experience her first.

“I remember seeing Laura at the velodrome years ago,” says Kenny’s mother Lorraine.

“I said to my husband, ‘Flipping heck, you need to watch this young lady.’ She was in the elimination race, only a tiny thing, and she kept sprinting over the top of everyone. She was amazing.

“The first time I knew something was happening between the two of them was when Jason phoned me up and said, ‘I’m bringing Trotty home for a bacon butty.’

“I said to him, ‘Is she your girlfriend?’ ‘No, she’s just a friend.’

“She made herself at home straight away. Into the house, sat down, feet up on the sofa.

“We liked her from the off. She’s a girly girl, so I can talk make-up and clothes to her. It’s such a treat – having had two sons, I’ve had years of remote-control cars and standing out in the rain, and at last I can talk to someone about posh shoes.”

Trott and Kenny are not the first couple to both win Olympic golds.

Some (Steffi Graf, ladies’ singles 1988, Andre Agassi, men’s singles 1996) have carried more global renown. Others have also won gold in the same sport at the same Games, most recently triathletes Jan Frodeno and Emma Snowsill at Beijing in 2008. But no-one at a summer Games has more. No-one else gets even close.

Neither has the British duo finished. Trott is 24, Kenny 28. The next Olympics in Tokyo are in their sights.

“When I first met Laura, what stuck in my mind was how she was on what she wanted to achieve,” says her agent Luke Lloyd Davies. She said to me, ‘I want to be the most decorated British Olympian of all time’. I remember thinking, for a 21-year-old to have that determination is remarkable.