Later, sitting down with Kenny on his own, I ask him about Carlin’s observation that “Jason is Jason. Always very calm. Until he’s not”. He laughs. “I’m not sure I’ve ever lost my temper with them,” he says. “Maybe I start swearing a bit more when I’m stressed. But generally speaking I try to keep it fun, you have to remind yourself of that.”
To illustrate his point, Kenny says he took the squad to Mottram Hall, a luxury spa hotel in Cheshire, for a team-building day earlier this year where they had a blast. Although he adds they did not go overboard. “Because I’m obsessed with performance I tried to pick something that was going to make them faster,” he admits. “I didn’t want to take them go-karting or paintballing or something where they could get hurt. So we went and did a luxury spa and everyone really bought into it.” Fluffy dressing gowns and slippers to go with the tiara? “Haha, that would have completed the look,” he says, laughing.
Kenny applied for the men’s sprint coach role the January after Tokyo, and readily admits it has been a “steep learning curve”. But he feels he has started to get to grips with it in the last year or so. “It’s a bit like anything in that it’s not that difficult to do but it’s difficult to do really, really well,” he observes. “Everything you do you always look back and think, ‘That could have been better’.
“We go to a race and I’ll think ‘I could have done that a bit differently or we could have been a bit better here’. And so I think now I’ve settled into accepting that, I’m just getting better every time I do something. And that’s sort of my theory now. I just keep chipping away. I’m 1,000 times better than I was at the start just generally with organisation, with prioritisation.”
‘We no longer set target times’
One thing Kenny has changed, which Carlin spoke about, is that he does not like to set target times. “We used to always have a target in mind,” Carlin said. “At the start of the cycle we’d say: ‘Right, over the last however many years, and past Olympics, this is where we think we’re going to have to be to be medal contenders…’ P1 needs to do this, P2 needs to do this and P3 needs to do this, roughly.
“It’s the same in the sprint and the keirin. You need to get this many average results to get into the keirin final. And in the sprint, you’ll need to get this time roughly to take on the big dogs. But the times haven’t been given to us this time.”
Why not? “I hate doing targets,” Kenny shrugs. “What if you win a race, but don’t hit your time. Have we failed? On the flip side, what if you have finished 20th but you’ve hit your time. Have you succeeded? I just think, try to maximise every minute between now and then and see where that leaves us.”