Olympics-bound Liam Jegou: 'I've always been very proud to be Irish'

Canoe Slalom racer Liam Jegou was the first Team Ireland athlete to be selected for the Tokyo Olympic Games.

Ask any Olympic hopeful for their plans this next six months and the only guarantee is a hesitancy borne of doubt.

Like the rest of us, they are hostages to fortune and a pandemic that is proving harder to shift than a drunken uncle at Christmas but Liam Jegou's delay when quizzed on his schedule a few weeks ago owed itself to something else entirely.

“Ehm, I'm actually off to Réunion,” he explained somewhat apologetically.

He knows how that must sound to the 99.9% of us for whom a change of scenery right now amounts to nothing more than a shuffle from the kitchen into the sitting-room but he had good reason to head for the French territory just east of Madagascar.

The island, with its superb whitewater facility, is a magnet for some of the best slalom canoeists in the world and its motto – 'I will flourish wherever I am brought' – seems especially apposite for a man who has already held addresses in three different countries.

Born in Brittany to a French father and an Irish mother, he spent his first two years living in Switzerland and the next five in Ballyvaughan, Co Clare where his dad owned a canoeing business and he himself first tested the waters in and around Bishop's Quarter.

“My first memories are in Ireland, I remember it well,” he said of those early years.

Now 25, home for most of the last two decades was the small French town of Huningue in the east of the country with the German border a five-minute walk in one direction and Switzerland something similar in another.

This cosmopolitan mix was given further flavour by a host of other nationalities besides. All these influences were absorbed as naturally as the air he breathed and it left him with a high level of German to go with his fluent English and French.

Canoe Slalom racer Liam Jegou was one of the first Team Ireland athlete to be selected for the Tokyo Olympic Games. Picture: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile

It's a background that was put to good use in Pau, in the south of the country, the town where Jegou graduated with a degree in Applied Foreign Languages and which remains his base because of the state-of-the-art course where he trains.

France has clearly been good to him but he was only ever going to wear green.

“In Ireland we have a very big diaspora. There are so many Irish people in the States and around Europe and I guess the fact that I didn't speak French when we first moved here marked me straight away as Irish and you like to stand out when you are little.

“In [Huningue] there are lots of people with more than one nationality, more kids like that than those who are just French, so maybe that played into it a little. I've always been very proud to be Irish. I dunno, some things you just can't explain.”

Jegou made history in November with Ireland's first ever canoe slalom gold in a World Cup event and this on the back of a team silver at the Europeans two months earlier. He is clearly in a good place, metaphorically and literally, because France is where it is at in his game.

Well, France and Slovakia. The last time the Olympic Games' C1 slalom class was won by a paddler from a nation other than those two powerhouses was 1996. The depth of talent, and competition for the one Olympic place on offer per nation, in both countries is frightening.

Take Denis Gargaut Chanut as an example. Gold medallist in Rio but he won't be appearing in Tokyo after failing to come through the French trials. Or Cedric Joly: world champion in 2019 and consigned to a spectating brief this summer.

Only 17 places are available in all and Jegou has bagged one of them.

It's almost a year since he was officially named as the first member of Team Ireland for Games that would be postponed just a month later and he is still the only athlete whose place has actually been rubber-stamped by the Olympic Federation of Ireland. The uncertainty over the Games remains as dense as the fog that shrouded the Piton de la Fournaise volcano Jegou hiked in Reunion last weekend but the road beyond that is clear for a man intent on representing Ireland at the 2024 Games in Paris and in LA four years later.

“Maybe it's cheesy but I like the lifestyle and travelling around. I like whitewater and I just love the fact that we can train on so many different types of whitewater courses. It's always different and I just really enjoy the sport.”