London: Four-time Olympic champion Laura Trott has expressed annoyance over the questions posed by rivals about British cyclists’ extraordinary performances at the Rio Games.
Trott won two gold medals and her fiance Jason Kenny claimed three golds as Team GB stormed to the top of the cycling medals table with six golds and 12 in total.
Britain won nine medals at this year’s World Championships in London, having won only three silver medals at last year’s event in Paris, prompting rival cyclists to question their improvement.
But Trott, 24, told BBC radio: “I’m not angry as such, but it is a little bit annoying and frustrating because it is a lot of hard work that has gone into that performance.”
Australia’s Anna Meares and French sprint coach Laurent Gane both said the British cyclists’ success in Rio was hard to understand.
Germany’s Kristina Vogel called it “questionable”.
Trott added: “British Cycling has always been very much an Olympics-based programme, so for us it wasn’t about clearing up at the World Championships.
“Don’t get me wrong, it would have been nice because they were in London, but it’s always been around the Olympics.
“That’s what our funding is pushed towards, that’s where they spend our UK Sport money.
“If we’d come away and under-performed at the Olympics, we’d have been gutted if we’d cleaned up at London because it would have meant we’d have peaked at the wrong time.
“I think what a lot of other nations don’t know, and what they don’t see, is the fact that it doesn’t really matter about the World Championships. It’s all about the Olympics.”
With four gold medals in total, Trott is Britain’s most successful female Olympian.
Britain’s most decorated female Olympic athlete Katherine Grainger, meanwhile, said that psychopaths and elite sportspeople share certain characteristics including pushing life to the limit,
The 40-year-old Scotswoman — who defied the sceptics to take silver in the women’s double sculls in Rio to medal for the fifth successive Games — came to this conclusion when she wrote her dissertation on psychopaths for a Masters in medical law and ethics, to add to her degree in law and another in homicide.
Grainger, who tumultuously won gold in the London Games and then took two years out before returning to the sport, emphasised the similarities only went so far.
“My masters was in psychopaths and I try not to link it directly to rowing and my teammates,” she said after arriving back from Rio with many of her team-mates who had also contributed to the record 67 medals.
“It is not a direct comparison in any way. But it is quite an extreme part of human behaviour and the mental side of people and actions and thoughts and deeds, to a certain extent sport is like that.
“People who are very passionate, very driven at what they do and take it right to the limit of human performance.
“It is always interesting seeing human beings experiencing life at the limit, whatever that limit is.”