Canoe Slalom wasn’t meant to be part of the schedule at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. If it hadn’t been, Jess and Noemie Fox would never have paddled for Australia and won gold.
It was the fight to keep canoe slalom in the Games and to fund a whitewater venue in Penrith, that brought Richard and Miriam Fox to Australia more than 25 years ago, along with their now-famous daughters.
Jess and Noemie Fox after training at the Penrith Whitewater Stadium.Credit: Nick Moir
Jess is now the greatest paddler in the sport’s history, and Noemie also an Olympic champion, but if Richard hadn’t rallied to find the funding, the Foxes never would have migrated Down Under.
“That’s what brought us here. That’s the beginning of the story. In 1996, after the Atlanta Games, the minister for the Olympics at the time, Michael Knight, decided they wouldn’t build the whitewater venue [in Sydney] and host the slalom events,” Richard said.
“The sport globally was rocked by that, they just said you’re off the program, and Sydney 2000 won’t have canoe slalom at the Games. I was living in France at the time with Miriam…and I got involved in this movement to overturn that decision.”
Richard, who represented Great Britain in the sport at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, and Miriam, who won bronze for France in Atlanta in 1996, spent the next couple of years fighting to keep the sport alive.
Jess Fox joins her sister Noemie celebrating a gold medal win in the kayak cross at the Paris Games.Credit: AP
“We had to do the pitch to the minister. The Penrith City Council came to the table, the sport with the international federation, Pacific Power international, and we found half the money to pay for it,” Richard said.
“The main thing is that we turned it around, we were on the program, and we’ve been at every Games since 1992 … It was really a critical moment for the sport because it’s hard to recover if you get taken out.”
As Penrith prepares to host the 2025 canoe slalom world championships in October, Jess reflected on what a turning point that moment had been.
“It’s a story that’s maybe not widely known, or not often told, but the reason we’re still in the Olympic movement is because he [Richard] lobbied with the NSW government, the Penrith Council, and the ICF [International Canoe Federation] and AOC [Australian Olympic Committee] to get that venue built in Penrith and to get that funding,” Jess Fox said.
Jess Fox celebrates her gold medal with her dad Richard Fox.Credit: AP
“We could have ended up in France. We could have been racing for France or Great Britain or not in the sport at all had that not happened.”
Richard visited Australia three times during the campaign and was rewarded with both a green light for the venue and a job as Australian head coach.
“We get to the end of the 2000 Olympics, and I was like, now what? So, we stayed another four years and then the girls said, well, we don’t really want to go to school in France, we’d rather stay here, so that was it,” Richard said.
“And then we got our citizenship and stayed, and here we are … There would always be paddlers in Australia, but they [Jess and Noemie] wouldn’t have been amongst them. They would have been, with my background or Miriam’s background, they’d have been paddling for Great Britain or France.”
