Katy Marchant interview: Leeds Olympic medallist relishing 'career 2.0' after pregnancy

The answer to the first part is a very encouraging yes. The second question…to be determined.

For next week, just seven months after the birth of her son, five months after she returned to training and two races into her competitive comeback, the 30-year-old from Leeds represents Great Britain at the European Track Cycling Championships in Switzerland.

The event marks the first qualifier on the road to the 2024 Paris Olympics, which Marchant hopes will be the third of a career highlighted by a bronze medal in the individual sprint in Rio in 2016.

Simply being selected in the 21-strong squad for the Europeans is further ahead than she hoped to be when she made the decision to return to competitive cycling following the birth of son Arthur last summer.

“It’s been an absolute whirlwind, but one I’ve absolutely loved and taken to quite well,” Marchant tells The Yorkshire Post.

“I’ve been lucky that physically I’ve managed really well and getting back into training has run as smoothly as I think it can.

“I was unsure about coming back after the last Olympics. Leaving Tokyo I felt like I wasn’t finished but I wasn’t quite sure what it was that would keep me going.

“Then I got married, had a bit of time away, fell pregnant and then all of a sudden just thought cycling is what I want to keep doing.

“I just felt like that there is no reason why this should be the thing that is stopping me.”

Marchant appreciates she was lucky with a healthy pregnancy and delivery, but had also been conditioning her body for the transition.

“I have a lot of new-found respect for my body, I have always trained as hard as I can. I love hard work, I always have, and I love a challenge and this is the biggest I could go through,” she says.

“Physically I’ve worked incredibly hard. I was doing pilates when Arthur was two weeks old. I knew that in order to be able to treat my body like a tool I had to be good to it, I had to look after it through pregnancy and post-pregnancy. I was training up until 39 weeks, obviously being sensible with what I was doing.

“I kept moving all the way through and that’s what helped me gett straight back in after giving birth.

“It’s about listening to your body, which is something I’ve always done really well. I’ve always been self-aware of what’s going on with my body, I’ve never suffered any major injuries touch wood, so I think being able to read my body helped me. I was able to communicate with the physios and the women’s health physios about how I was feeling and what I was capable of doing.”

She also listened to her team-mates. Queens of the track and road, Laura Trott and fellow Yorkshirewoman Lizzie Deignan have both started families and come back to the very high standards they had previously set. But Marchant had a closer ally in Elinor Barker, a few months ahead of her on the motherhood journey but another who makes her major international comeback in Switzerland.

“Elinor has guided me through what I was doing, what sort of training I could do,” says Marchant, who also added that British Cycling were supportive to the point of encouraging her to have a family and come back to competing.

“Having someone who is going through it with you in those moments was massive.

“I appreciate it’s different for everybody, what one person finds hard might be completely different to what another person finds hard, but El has been amazing. To have her on the good days, and the bad days, has really helped.”

Marchant will ride the team sprint and the 500m in Switzerland.

With an Olympic medal in the individual sprint in Rio and a quarter-final appearance in the keirin in Tokyo in her past, the new mum has returned with a new focus.

“The team sprint is the main one, if you’re not in the team sprint you’re not on the plane to Paris,” she says, mindful that this summer’s world track championships in Glasgow will be a major barometer of whether she can qualify for a third Games.

“I want to try something different. This is a great opportunity for me. I feel like I’m doing a new sport.

“I want to ride everything in Paris. I want to be the best. I feel privileged to have achieved what I have in my career but this is a golden opportunity to try career 2.0 and right now I couldn’t be happier with how things are going, while not putting too much pressure on myself.”