Dame Laura Kenny reveals she’s pregnant together with her third baby after Olympian and husband Jason suffered years of fertility woes

Dame Laura Kenny has revealed she’s expecting her third child with fellow Olympian Jason Kenny after years of fertility woes. 

She took to Instagram on New Year’s Eve to share the good news, posting a video of her children wearing T-shirts that read ‘I’m going to be a big brother to a baby’. 

Laura, 32, captioned the post: ‘2024 was wonderful, 2025 is going to be even more special.’

She was congratulated by other sporting legends, with swimmer Rebecca Adlington writing: ‘Congratulations ❤️❤️’; and heptathlete Jessica Ennis-Hill commenting: ‘I knew it ❤️ congratulations to you both’. 

The sweet news comes after years of fertility woes for Laura and Jason. 

Just hours before she announced her pregnancy news, the cyclist revealed her thoughts on her health, claiming elite sport may have caused her ‘out of control’ body to suffer a miscarriage.

Dame Laura, Britain’s most successful female athlete, boasts five gold medals and a silver from three separate Olympic games.

She says she ‘gave 100 per cent’ to every training session and race for more than a decade, even questioning if she had worked hard enough if she did not throw up after a workout.

But her commitment may have had an impact on her fertility, she has revealed.

After marrying fellow cycling phenomenon Jason and welcoming their first child in 2017, she miscarried in November 2021 and had an ectopic pregnancy five months later.

This occurs when a fertilised egg implants and grows outside of the womb – usually in one of the fallopian tubes – requiring emergency surgery.

‘Everything was a shock – I went from being so in control of my body to being so out of control,’ she told Radio 4’s Today programme.

‘Was my body just running on empty, and then it said, ‘Well, hang on, there’s no way we can do this?’

While she successfully gave birth to another son, Monty, in July 2023, she had started to talk publicly about her baby losses.

Other athletes soon revealed they had been through the same thing – raising questions as to whether elite sport could have a damaging impact on fertility.

Dr Emma O’Donnell, an exercise physiologist at Loughborough University, said the lifestyle of a professional athlete puts a unique strain on the human body.

Training at their level burns an incredibly high number of calories and as a result, athletes often have very little body fat.

If they don’t eat enough food to fuel their workouts then issues with menstrual cycles – such as periods stopping for months or even years – are ‘very common’, Dr O’Donnell said.

The leading idea if that having a baby is so energy-intensive that the brain shuts off reproduction if it thinks there isn’t enough spare energy available, she told the BBC.

In the UK around one in every 90 pregnancies is ectopic – the equivalent of around 11,000 per year.

While it is still unclear why they occur, inflammation and scar tissue in the fallopian tubes can increase the risk.

Professor Geeta Nargund, a consultant at St George’s Hospital and medical director of Create Fertility, said she doesn’t see a ‘direct link’ between sports and a higher risk of an ectopic pregnancy.

However, she said there was a potential link between too much intense exercise in the first three months of pregnancy and miscarriage.

During a chat with Women’s Health in June, Laura opened up about how the heartbreak of her miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy completely changed her mindset and she was left wanting a baby over any sporting medal. 

The cyclist, who announced her retirement from the sport back in March, confessed she found herself frustrated with her body as she could her push herself to incredible physical heights, yet she couldn’t have a baby. 

She told the publication: ‘I cannot tell you how sad I was for a year to 18 months. I mean, you could ask Jase how I was, I was a different person. 

‘I just went within myself because it was consuming. And all I wanted was this little baby; I didn’t want gold medals, you know, I didn’t want to go and race in the Commonwealth Games. I wanted a baby. And it just wasn’t happening.’

Before the birth of her second son and a year after her ectopic pregnancy Laura won a silver medal at the 2022 Commonwealth Games but admitted she didn’t find happiness in the win. 

She explained: ‘I was like, why will [my body] do that and it won’t do the one thing that I just want the most…

‘I felt like I was living in this yin and yang world where you could only have one of them.

‘And when you’re an athlete who has had so much control over their body for so long, it literally just felt like the carpet had been ripped out from underneath me because all of a sudden I wasn’t in control of it, and there was nothing that I could do.’

While she added that she doesn’t want to label her sadness at the time as depression, she confessed: ‘I’d hate to put a label on myself, but that was the lowest I’ve been – 100%. It was mentally the toughest period of my life.’

Laura also opened up about how the miscarriage affected her husband.

‘No one asked him if he was okay, and how he was feeling,’ she explained.

‘And so I guess I totally underestimated how much I was using him and how much I was talking to him and never actually saying, “Jase, are you actually okay yourself?”

‘And it wasn’t until quite a long time after that…he could even tell me how bad it was for him, too.’

Back in March Laura explained she had made the decision to hang up her bike after struggling to spend time away from her children and the sacrifice of leaving her family at home.

Speaking about the struggle of balancing both elite sport and motherhood she admitted that it is doable but it comes with sacrifice, and she wasn’t 100% at her best for the Tokyo Olympics. 

‘It it comes with sacrifice. And you’ve got to be prepared for a non-perfect build-up…do I think I went into Tokyo absolutely 100% at my best? No, of course I don’t. 

‘Because rest days weren’t rest days and any time I was at home, I wasn’t sat on the sofa like Jase and I used to be. I was out on the trampoline, I was playing in the sandpit…So do I think it was harder? Yes. [But] it doesn’t need to be incompatible.’

Discussing the birth of her second child, Monty, Laura said he completely changed her mindset as an athlete. 

She explained: ‘I felt so privileged to be able to have been pregnant again and then bring him into the world [that] I was just struggling to leave him. 

‘I couldn’t leave him for training sessions because, why would I? All I wanted was him.’

Laura admitted she left her son Albie at home dur to Covid protocols during the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 and found it ‘heart-wrenching’. 

‘I’m not really a crier…and the only time that Albie ever remembers Mummy crying is when I had to leave him to go to the Olympics.

‘And it just felt like someone literally ripped my heart out and was just throwing it away. It was awful. I remember messaging Jase when I was in the [Athletes’] Village, just saying, ‘I hope that I never feel like this again.’