By Vince Rugari
To get what she wanted the most, Jessica Fox had to learn how to let go. Or, in the words of her performance coach Nam Baldwin: “Try easier.” Not harder.
It sounds like a bit like a riddle, and Australia watched on intently as Fox tried her best to solve it in real time at the Tokyo Olympics in pursuit of the gold medal that had for so long eluded her. At first, she failed - although bronze was still a pretty good reward in her K1 final, which is something she often has to reminder herself of, despite having fallen short of the world’s expectations and her own.
Jessica Fox’s Tokyo campaign has already gone down as one of the greatest Olympic tales in Australian history.Credit: Harry How
But the “emotional rollercoaster” that followed, and her ability to recover from the disappointment, withstand the pressure and deliver in the C1 final two days later has already gone down as one of Australia’s greatest ever Olympic tales.
Fox’s journey from paddling prodigy to world champion - and then, finally, Olympic gold medallist - has been captured in a new documentary, Jess Fox: Greatest to Gold, which is airing on the Seven Network this weekend.
In it, Fox is shown watching the K1 race that stopped the nation for the first time, having studiously avoided the footage in the months since Tokyo. The lessons from it, she said, were immediately apparent to her after being put on the spot by the film’s producers.
“The worst part was that it didn’t look as bad as it felt during the race,” she told the Herald and The Age.
Jessica Fox celebrates with her gold medal in Tokyo.Credit: Getty
“I obviously had those two penalties and the whole run felt awful in comparison to my others. I was battling the water, it was a hard struggle, everything felt offline and I just had to push a lot harder than when things feel effortless and you’re flying on the water - when in fact, I was quite fast despite not feeling good. In a way, that’s how it got away from me.
“You don’t want to force things. That’s the biggest thing. Sometimes with effort, and with sport, you want to try too hard. For me, that kayak race, I tried too hard in the final. With hindsight, you can see those things. You can see how you make an early mistake and then you want to push and try harder, but that’s where in fact you have to let go and just be free.”
Born into kayaking royalty, Fox’s parents Richard and Myriam were Olympic paddlers for England and France respectively, boasting 18 world titles between them - so while she was always likely to have the talent, the 27-year-old has always been burdened to a degree by her family heritage in the sport.
Despite being an 11-time world champion herself, and probably the best female paddler of all time, Fox had never won Olympic gold, and for years she tried to convince herself it wouldn’t define her if it didn’t happen. Add in the pandemic, the floods in NSW that interrupted her preparation, and it was easy to see how Fox could have mentally collapsed in Tokyo - especially after what happened in the K1.
Instead, she found a way to empty her mind, focus on her next goal, and headed to a place athletes, artists and others often speak about with wonderment: the zone, that mystical plane where body and mind become one and peak performance unfolds naturally.
“Anyone, in any profession, can experience [it] ... athletes maybe more often, because we know how to get into that state,” Fox said.
“But you also can’t force it. You can’t say, ‘OK, now I’m going to do this and this’ to be in flow. You’ve got to let it happen, and it doesn’t always happen. You’ve still got to be able to perform and deal with it when it doesn’t. When it does click, everything feels easy, in slow motion, you can control everything.
“I actually don’t remember much when I’m in flow state. In that C1 race, I was very much in that. I remember snippets: coming into that second upstream - gate 10, I think it was - I heard I was up on the split time. So I had an advantage and I heard that, and then I didn’t hear anything else, and I don’t remember anything else except the sprint to the finish.”
She suspects her dad was in a similar sort of state when he was commentating the event for the Seven Network, choking back tears and somehow maintaining his composure as Fox crossed the line.
“It was good for him to have that job, because it kept him from getting nervous - obviously, he was nervous, but he wasn’t twiddling his thumbs waiting for the race, he was focused and commentating,” she said.
“I think people are like, ‘How did you not lose it?’ And I can kind of hear in the recording that he’s quiet, and then all he says is, ‘Wow’. And I’m like, that’s him losing it quietly.”
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