LAURA KENNY is happy to keep her maiden name Trott — if it helps her win the Sports Personality of the Year award.
The British cycling star has adopted the catchy social media hashtag #Trotty4Spoty in a bid to see off overwhelming favourite Andy Murray.
Kenny blitzed to two gold medals at the Rio Olympics this summer alongside hubby Jason Kenny’s three.
And she is giving the battle for the prestigious BBC gong her best shot after marrying and taking Jason’s family name in September.
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Kenny said: “Andy Murray’s going to win . . . I would love to win, of course I would.
“But I’ll be Trotty for now, so I can be #Trotty4Spoty. It’s a great hashtag, isn’t it?”
Despite 2016 Wimbledon and Olympic gold winner Murray soaring away as the bookies’ jolly, surely Kenny is the best of the rest in a competitive year.
The 24-year-old blew the SPOTY field open when she won Olympic omnium gold in Rio, having also grabbed team pursuit glory with Katie Archibald, Elinor Barker and Joanna Rowsell Shand.
But Kenny reckons she was not even in Olympic-winning shape in the build-up to the summer spectacular until she stepped off the plane in Brazil, admitting she felt worryingly short of form until the final few days before competition.
Maybe it was a fluke but credit should go to British Cycling coach Paul Manning and his detail-obsessed colleagues, who left her legs feeling heavy in their holding camp in Newport so that they reached Rio in tip-top form.
And boy did it work, with Britain’s cyclists winning six golds, four silvers and two bronze medals in Brazil.
Kenny added: “I’d never felt so rubbish. I’d done so much work beforehand.
“Some of the girls had a day or two here and there if they got a cold. But I hadn’t missed a session beforehand, I didn’t get ill, I didn’t get injured.
“Looking back, I just needed two days here or there but I just couldn’t have it.
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“We had a long flight but when we got to Rio I started to feel a little bit better.
“But it wasn’t till pre-race day that I was like, ‘OK, I’m ready now, I feel like I can do this’.
“I’ve never seen Paul have a flutter. He’s usually so cool, calm and collected and Richard Freeman, our doctor, came up to me and said, ‘Paul’s asking if you’re OK’.
“I was like, ‘Oh god’ — when your coach is asking, you know it’s bad. But I knew I was going to be fine.”
Since the Games, the Essex-born rider has quite rightly had her feet up. She only returned to the track earlier this month to test out the re-jigged omnium format at Revolution London, which has been reduced from six events to four.
Paparazzi, sponsorship endorsements, glossy mag interviews and woman of the year awards have been plentiful during a post-Games lull, but Kenny reckons it has been a sea-change compared to after London 2012.
She added: “In Alderley Edge the other day there were some paparazzi there for the footballers’ wives or whoever happened to be there.
“One jumped out on me and then all of a sudden three came down the road. It nearly gave me a heart attack.
“You get used to it. When we landed from Rio I was thinking how do you deal with these people? I can’t imagine how Coleen Rooney must feel.
“After London everyone said ‘this is going to change your life’ — and it did but it wasn’t so much.
“But this time it really has changed, everybody knows us. It’s taken us out of the cycling world, which is weird.”
As for April’s World Championships in Hong Kong, Kenny admitted she is going to try and win a place in the GB team — but has not been focused on training for it.
She said: “I wouldn’t want to take a spot if they thought I’m not fit enough.
“I don’t think Paul would select me if he thought I’d be useless.”
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