Fox said seven words to herself, and smiled like an assassin. She raced like one
Under soupy skies, over surging waters, Jess Fox looked dead ahead. She wore the coolest of gazes, with an imperious stare, an angular brow, and the faint smile of the assassin.
“I have this killer look,” Fox acknowledged later, moments after winning gold in the canoe slalom. “That’s how I have to get into my zone. I was just staring down the course. Focusing on my breath. Not really thinking about anything. I just felt calm, and I felt confident, and knew that I just had to go out and do what I know how to do.”
Did she ever. Halfway through the women’s C1 final at Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium on Wednesday evening, Elena Lilik from Germany came hard for the crown, with a blistering run of 103.54, two seconds faster than anyone on the course so far.
Fox knew it was going to take something special to win, and with the last heat of the Parisian summer sun waning, and the cool splash of the artificial torrent beckoning, Fox found what she was looking for - a near-flawless run of 99.06, coming out to 101.06 only after a late penalty.
It was still enough to win by more than two seconds. Thus it was done, and (another) gold was won.
The climactic finish gave Fox an unprecedented sixth individual Olympic medal - more than any Australian in history - whilst also franking a legitimate claim as the greatest slalom paddler in Olympic history. And a clutch performer nonpareil.
Jessica Fox celebrates her gold medal performance.Credit: Eddie Jim
“The mental state that I was in - the calm I felt, despite the expectation, despite the pressure,” Fox said, pausing. “To be able to stay composed is the coolest feeling as an athlete, when you’ve worked so hard at training. To be able to pull it off when it matters - that’s what we all work towards, for that one day every four years.”
Slalom canoe is an interesting sport. Each competitor has to find their way through a tumultuous horseshoe course, passing through 25 gates suspended above the stream - the downstream gates marked green, upstream in red. You get time penalties for missing gates, or touching them, making the contest a neat convergence of speed and skill, rendered by your own power.
Fox was battling 11 other finalists, but one gets the sense that her true fight was with the unrelenting force and weight of the water itself. She seemed to sit atop the cool aqua at times, almost commanding from on high, but also sank low into white rushing gullies, spray skirt submerged in eddies, arms pumping with purpose.
Laser-focused Fox twists down the rapids.Credit: AP
She shuffled and shimmied her way down the chute, showing enviable core strength. Call it gumption of the guts - all too easily digging and pivoting and pulling her way past each gate - flying forwards through some, and flailing backwards through others.
She’s not just strong, however, but supple, too, twisting her body through its middle section with unadvised flexibility. She lies back and leans forward and sways sideways, her hips like some multi-directional hinge. I suspect Jess Fox would be very, very good with a hula hoop.
She’s smart, too, interpreting the fluid dynamics with the mind of an engineer, or perhaps a diviner, sensing its rhythms but controlling it all the same - harnessing the strength of that elemental force, like a rider on a horse.
What she does looks (and is) incredibly hard, yet she makes it seem so simple, like child’s play. When she stood atop the dais after her win, she couldn’t help but jump up and down and giggle and grin like the little kid she once was. The GOAT sat afloat on her boat.
It helped that she’s at home in this space, in this place. Fox, 30, was born in Marseille, southern France, and is the progeny of paddlers. Her coach is her mother, Myriam, who won bronze in 1996 in Atlanta, and her father Richard is also an Olympian, and a commentator for Nine.
An elated Jess Fox completes an extraordinary double.Credit: Getty Images
“To be able to reach this level, it’s not just me,” Fox pointed out. “It’s the family behind me, it’s the support behind me, the investment of the Australian sport system as well, since I was a junior athlete and growing up in Penrith, and having that white water course from the Sydney Olympic games... I think so much can happen when you dream, when you believe and when you work hard.”
She was always going to be the one to beat going into this race. The defending gold medallist from Tokyo, no less. Amid the consternation and tension before the final, a French journalist threw up her hands before Fox had even touched the water, offering a sentiment felt by many in the media scrum: “You ‘ave nussing to worry about,” she said, “Jessica Fox weel ween. She is up ‘ere. Zee rest are down ’zere.”
But there are no guarantees in an event this unpredictable. Being the flag bearer could have been a burden, but Fox turned it into fuel. Pressure as a privilege.
She won gold in the kayak on Sunday, and that could have brought challenges, too, like expectation, or hubris, or garden variety complacency. Fox spoke of the “joy and elation” in that first triumph in Paris, and how it felt in the moment, and how “sometimes that can leave you feeling pretty flat for the next event.”
Instead, the earlier victory freed her to enjoy all the other moments to come, like this one. Before the final, Fox drank in the view of the crowd, and listened to the French announcer (she’s a fluent speaker), and soaked it all up. Finding a new level of confidence and calm, she was left only with a luxurious license to be dangerous. After all, when the memory of your last Olympic gold is four days old, you’re playing with house money.
What did she say to herself in the moments before flying down the chute? “Be myself. Let it be. Be free,” she said. “I was nervous about certain moves, but visualisation is so powerful - to be able to see yourself do it before you get out there.”
She’s not done yet, either. Next up, she’s competing in the kayak cross - a new discipline at Olympic level, in which four athletes race against each other, where Fox might even compete against her sister, Noemie.
The Fantastic Ms Fox may yet win a third gold of this games, and shatter a few more norms. “I’ve never thought about those records. They’ve never felt attainable, or even something that I could possibly dream about.”
That makes sense. She really is in uncharted territory now. Each Olympic experience has been different by both tone and degree, through loss and heartbreak, domination and exaltation. “Some have been brilliant, some have been disappointing,” she said, “but this was just magical.”
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