Monday photo feature

The whitewater slalom competition is underway at the Olympic Games in Paris.  Coming into the Games, there was probably no favorite more solid than the one pictured above, Jessica Fox of Australia.

Slalom success runs in Fox’s family: her father Richard, who competed in men's kayak for Great Britain, was heralded as perhaps the greatest the sport had ever seen while winning five world championships (1981, 1983, 1985, 1989, 1993).  Her mother Myriam was a world champion in 1989 and 1993 while competing in women's kayak for France.  Though slalom was absent from the Olympic programme for much of their careers, Richard and Myriam hung around long enough to become Olympians in the 1990s, Myriam winning a bronze medal in 1996.

When Jessica was four, the family moved to Australia so that Richard could take a coaching position with the national team there, and that's how Jessica came to compete for that nation.  Now Jessica is the one people are saying might be the greatest slalomist ever.  That doesn't mean she wins the gold every time out; the competition is strong enough, and the sport is fickle enough, for her to take her share of defeats.  But she does wind up on the podium with remarkable regularity.  She has medaled in kayak, canoe, or both at eight of the ten world championships held since 2010, and finished first eight times.  She has also amassed an eye-popping 75 medals in World Cup competition.

In the picture above, an 18-year-old Jessica is competing at her first Olympics at London in 2012 (I lifted it from her Instagram page).  The moment captured looks like a potential disaster, but she held her act together to claim the silver medal in women's kayak.  Four years later in Rio, she was the bronze medalist.  Women's canoe made its Olympic debut in Tokyo three years ago, and Jessica won the gold medal in that class while taking another bronze in women's kayak.

That brings us to this past weekend in Paris.  Jessica was the second-fastest athlete in the preliminary round Saturday.  Yesterday she started off low-key by finishing 8th in the semifinal round, five seconds (including a 2-second gate-touch penalty) off the pace.  But she came through when it counted, winning the final with a clean run to claim her first Olympic gold in kayak.  She still has the canoe class to come: that starts tomorrow.  And at age 30, she's quite likely to have at least one more Olympic Games in her future.  I don't take much stock in "greatest of all time" debates, but Jessica Fox's reign over this particular era cannot be denied at this point.

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