Jason Kenny: ‘Winning will take care of itself if we do everything right’

“It was only on the back straight on the last lap,” Jason Kenny says as he remembers the moment last year in Tokyo when, in the final of the keirin, he realised that he might be about to win his seventh gold medal and become the most successful British athlete in Olympic history. “I’d come through the bell fully expecting them to catch me and then I hit the back straight and at that point all you want to do is climb off and go home. It hurts that much. But I kept telling myself: ‘It’s a medal, it’s a medal, it’s a medal.’ I was driving, driving, driving because, even if one or two come past me, they might not all catch me. Then, on the home straight, it was like: ‘Oh, it could be a gold medal.’”

Kenny, who is usually such a quiet and undemonstrative man, laughs loudly as we look across the deserted track at the Derby Velodrome. We’re a long way from Tokyo and that defining moment last August when Kenny rode his final race as a competitive cyclist. He is retired now, adjusting to his new role as Team GB’s men’s sprint cycling’s head coach and, on the day we meet, it’s his 34th birthday.

Related: ‘I creak quite a lot’: Jason Kenny calls time on record-breaking cycling career

After we consider the surreal coincidence that his birthday – 23 March – is shared with three other British Olympic greats in Chris Hoy, Steve Redgrave and Mo Farah, Kenny points out that Roger Bannister, who broke the four-minute mile, was also born on this very day. It’s a select group led by Kenny with his seven gold and two silver Olympic medals. He shakes his head as he tries to describe his historic victory.

“It was funny, a really strange experience,” Kenny says as, typically, he deflects the magnitude of his achievement. He also reiterates