When one gold medal isn’t enough

Jessica Fox’s mission to join the elite club of Australian champions who’ve won three Olympic golds at one Games has begun. Editor at Large Louise Evans tracks her historic crusade.

What do you do after winning one Olympic gold medal? If your name is Jessica Fox and you are on a mission to join the pantheon of Australia’s greatest Olympic champions … you head back to the athletes village, wind down, carb up, meditate and get some rest because another two gold medals beckon.

Fox, 30, is already the greatest paddler of all time – a fact reinforced by her agonising victory in the canoe slalom kayak in Paris, an event where she already has two Olympic bronze medals and one Olympic silver medal.

But such is her world domination and enormous bandwidth that in addition to the kayak, she’s also contesting the canoe slalom (Wednesday July 31) as the defending Olympic champion and the aggressive new Olympic event of kayak cross (Monday August 5).

Why three? Because she can. If she does it, she’ll become only the second non-swimmer along with the great sprinter Betty Cuthbert to win three golds at one Games – a feat achieved by just eight Australian athletes so far including swimmers Murray Rose, Ian Thorpe, Emma Mckeon, Shane Gould, Kaylee McKeown …

“I think it was just the perfect day for me. It didn’t start well, but it finished really well and it was just magical,” an emotional Fox said afterwards.

But why was Fox’s first gold medal in Paris so agonising? Because she suffered a hiccup enroute to the medal podium. It happens – even to the greatest.

Due to her Olympic success of four medals won at three previous Games, Fox was chosen as one of Australia’s two flag bearers for the rain-drenched opening ceremony along with five-time Olympian and Tasmanian hockey hero Eddie Ockenden. 

Even though she was starting her three-gold assault the next day, Fox never considered not carrying the flag down the Seine in the rain and the cold. 

She’s half French thanks to her Mum and coach Myriam, she’s based in Marseilles and is therefore the most “French of the Aussie Frenchies”. So she gets drenched at the opening ceremony and starts competing in the kayak the very next day. She nails her heat with a time of 92.18s, nearly a second faster than any of her rivals. 

Then in the semi there’s the hiccup. She had a less than convincing run, incurring a two-second time penalty for hitting one of the gates in a slow race down the rapids. She finishes in eighth position in 104.38s and 5.07 seconds behind the German leader and defending Olympic champion Ricarda Funk. It was not vintage Fox.

She’s one of the top 12 to qualify and so comes the Sunday final. Fox is seeded to race fifth. She blitzes it. Core strength of Thor, paddle like a hammer too. She loves the big water and she’s got the boat speed. Her great balance and boat craft come to the fore.

She has a near flawless run in 96.08 seconds. And then she plays the agonising waiting game as seven more paddlers fight their way down the rapids in front of 12,000 baying spectators at the white water venue 30km east of downtown Paris.

Noone can catch her. Poland’s Klaudia Zwolinska gets silver in 97.53s and Kimberley Woods of Great Britain scores the bronze in 98.94s.

“I’m just so happy, so proud, I can’t believe it,” Fox said immediately afterwards. “It was the longest wait. I couldn’t hold it together. At the end it was really hard to watch.” 

Afterwards she paid tribute to the team behind her that helped her on the long march to the podium. “It’s been years and years of chasing this dream, of getting really close, of persevering and picking myself back-up and a lot of teamwork. “I feel love and gratitude for everyone who has helped me to get here today, and to feel that energy from the crowd and also from everyone who was staying up late back home in Australia.”

The tears flowed aplenty including from her English father Richard, a 10-time world canoe champion who competed at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and Mum and coach Myriam, who paddled for France in 1992 and won Olympic bronze in Atlanta four years later. Plus her baby sister Noemie, with whom she’ll compete in the kayak cross, was also weeping with joy. 

“I couldn’t have done it without them and my family and friends, and the people in the crowd here were amazing,” she said. Mother Myriam said she rode an emotional rollercoaster watching Jess race and then waiting for the result.

“When I watched the race as I was not watching the technical, I was watching with emotion,” Myriam said. “I am so thrilled and happy for her. This is the one we really wanted.”

Fox had already survived a brutal test event enroute to Paris when she emerged with three gold medals from all three events in three consecutive days in Krakow Poland at the last pre-Games ICF World Cup event (June 14-16). 

So she started in Paris as the favourite, a status reinforced by 10 world championships plus four medals from three previous Olympics. In London 2012 aged 18 she won silver in the canoe slalom kayak. She went home from Rio 2016 with kayak bronze. In Tokyo she won kayak bronze again and broke through for gold in the canoe singles, making her the most successful canoe slalom woman in Olympic history. 

Now it’s game-on for Fox’s mission of three gold medals at one Games. As her mum/coach said “the job isn’t done yet”. “We celebrate and then the Games are back on and we move on to the next event. She has one day to recover and then we are back on with the heat of the C1,” Myriam said.

Get some sleep Jess, you are going to need it.