‘I’ve thrown up but it’s fine’: Fox’s nervous battle before gold run

After 11 world championship titles, a decade at the top of her sport, and silver and bronze medals in London and Rio de Janeiro, Jessica Fox has spent a long time saying Olympic gold is not a gap in her resume. For the past two days, after her second bronze in the K1 slalom, she had to keep telling herself: It’s not all about gold.

But by Thursday afternoon, maybe, it was.

Dream come true: Jessica Fox celebrates her gold medal in the C1 at Tokyo.Credit: Getty Images

Fox’s win in the inaugural Olympic C1 slalom for women sets her name in history. There is only one first time, and she felt like this achievement made up for the previous disappointments.

First, she had to process the most recent, her bronze medal in Tuesday’s K1 event. She slept poorly on Tuesday night, “when I did go through my [K1] race a million times, especially that last upstream gate when I incurred the penalty,” she said. “I’d felt ready and good before the K1 final and it just slipped away. I was absolutely gutted not to do the run I’d wanted.”

On Wednesday night she slept better, and by Thursday afternoon she said she “felt very nervous but that also meant I was ready”.

As Fox waited, Britain’s Mallory Franklin, paddling early in the field of 10, had posted a fast time of 106.68 seconds. Allowing for a two-second penalty, Franklin had got through the course faster than Fox had in her three qualifying times.

After Franklin, Fox’s other rivals gradually fell away. Andrea Herzog of Germany, Brazil’s Ana Satila and finally Tereza Fiserova of the Czech Republic all fell short of the mark set by Franklin.

Around this time, Fox, who said she had felt calm as she waited to start, had to go behind a tent and throw up. “Whatever I’d had between the runs didn’t sit well. But that was my body telling me I was getting ready for something big. It’s always about reframing those things and turning them into a positive.”

She saw her mother and coach, Myriam, and said, “I’ve thrown up but it’s fine”. They fist-bumped and Fox was ready.

It was all of Australia who felt like throwing up for the next 105.4 seconds. Fox got through the fiendish sequence of tight turns through gates four, five and six, set a strong rhythm through the middle of the course, and then faced a speedy slide into gate 15, which had undone Franklin. Fox said that this was the gate that worried her most. She made it, we breathed again, and, as Franklin observed from the competitors’ area, the gold medal was Fox’s.

Fox jumps for joy on the podium.Credit: AP

“Usually I’m cold-blooded,” Myriam said about her emotions while watching. “Today I wasn’t. I couldn’t watch any of the other girls, I couldn’t stand still, I was trying to breathe, I could have burst into tears. It was the most nervous I have been. When she was on her run I thought, ‘Hold it, hold it, hold it.’ I could have yelled my head off. Then from halfway through, I could have cried.”

For Jessica, seeing her name in first place meant “Relief, pure joy, all the emotions”.

“It was such a massive 48 hours after the kayak event. The Olympics are different. A lot of emotion involved, taxing mentally, emotionally and physically,” she said.

Her past medals, she has said, are “in a drawer somewhere” at home in Penrith. This one might get a special place, not least because it is the first time the C1 has included women paddlers.

“The C1 is extremely special these games,” Fox said. “I can’t believe I’ve become the first Olympic champion and I’m so proud of all the women who have raced in it.”

Starting with her mother, an Olympic bronze medallist herself. Canoe and kayak paddling is the Fox family business. Fox’s maternal step-grandfather, Albert Tobelem, founded the Marseille Mazargues Canoe Kayak Club in the south of France in 1981, and steered his step-daughter Myriam to take up the sport. Myriam, who would win 10 world championships, met Richard Fox, also a multiple world champion, and Jessica was born between Richard’s appearance at the Barcelona Olympics and Myriam’s at Atlanta. Neither was able to win, Richard coming fourth and Myriam third.

The family moved from Marseille to Sydney in 1998, when Richard took a job coaching the Australian canoe and kayak team for the Sydney Olympics. Myriam also became a coach in Australia, but Jessica’s progress into the family sport did not move in a straight line. She grew bored with kayaking on flat water and got interested in gymnastics. When she was twelve, she broke her arm in the gym and was encouraged by a physiotherapist to take up kayaking to help with her rehab. By then she was old enough to move to the white water version, and took advantage of the proximity of coaches in the family to progress in the sport. Her sister Noemie also became a top-level paddler.

Myriam, who became her coach, “gets the best out of me because she knows how to push my buttons, how to frustrate me, how to upset me, but at the same time she knows how to bring the best out of me and push me hard when I might me slacking off,” Fox said in a book about Jewish-Australian sportspeople, People of the Boot.

She is now the first Jewish-Australian to win Olympic gold, and also one of an unrecorded few who were dux of their high school, Fox having achieved this distinction at Blaxland High on her way to an ATAR score of 99.1.

“Both,” Myriam said when asked which made her prouder – a daughter who had won a gold medal or one who had been dux of her school. “You need to have a good head. She’s starting an MBA. Having an education is definitely just as important.”

And the gold medal for the family? It’s going to be somewhere special. “Richard and I never had this moment of being an Olympic champion,” Myriam said. “So I’m so happy she could do it for the Fox family… It’s hers, and you want the best for your kids, but I’m going to be able to see a gold medal at home!”

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