Canadian cyclist Alison Jackson’s fleeting Tokyo Games experience proved to her that she belongs at the Olympics

Opinion

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This article was published 25/07/2021 (1528 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TOKYO—It was only a little more than a week ago that Alison Jackson assumed she’d be watching Sunday’s Olympic women’s cycling road race on TV.

And for her, it might have been a difficult bit of viewing.

In 2019, after all, there was a moment when she was told she’d secured the third of Canada’s three spots in the women’s road race. She began to dream of racing in the shadow of iconic Mount Fuji, and all the other great experiences she’d enjoy in her Olympic debut. Later that same year, alas, she was informed those dreams had abruptly died; in a late-season shuffle of the world rankings, Canada lost one of its places in the Olympic peloton. So just like with the Rio Olympics in 2016, when Jackson was Canada’s first alternate, she’d be Canada’s first alternate at the 2020 Olympics.

The one-year pandemic postponement of the Games changed nothing. For the second time in two Games, it seemed as though she’d come as close to being an Olympian as you can get without being one. Which, she can tell you from experience, isn’t an especially great gig.

“You just watch the race from home on your TV like everybody else,” she said. “I was so stressed and so bummed.”

But something changed a little more than a week ago. A late race withdrawal opened up a spot in the Olympic field. Canada was given dibs. And Jackson woke one morning at her home in Abbotsford, B.C., to a raft of missed calls and text messages. One was from Cycling Canada’s high-performance director, Kris Westwood, who urged her to call his number in Tokyo. At first, Jackson thought she was being pranked.

“It didn’t sound like a real-life sort of thing,” she said.

But indeed, it was. A few days later, after missing one flight to Tokyo thanks to a problem with COVID-related paperwork, she arrived at her first Olympics, a lifetime goal achieved in a hard-to-fathom whirlwind.

“For me, it’s still shock and disbelief,” she said not long after she arrived. “It takes so much to get to the Olympics. But for me, it was an all-of-a-sudden thing.”

On Sunday, racing in the shadow of iconic Mount Fuji, the 32-year-old Jackson got to partake in her first Olympics. On a day when Canada won its first couple of medals at the aquatics centre, the women’s road race — ensuing as it did during the wee hours of North America’s key time zones — didn’t get a ton of attention. While riders from Europe commandeered the podium — with Austria’s Anna Kiesenhofer winning gold — none of Canada’s three riders threatened a medal.

Quebec’s Karol-Ann Canuel finished 16th, Dundas’s Leah Kirchmann 36th. And sandwiched between them was Jackson, who ended up 32nd. Jackson spent the day as Canada’s designated domestique, servicing her compatriots with cold water and ice-filled stockings procured from the team car driven by Steve Bauer, the Canadian cycling legend.

“Coming in, I didn’t have the optimal preparation, but I was really pleasantly surprised by my form,” Jackson said. “Being able to handle the heat and being able to support the girls with — I don’t know how many ice socks and cold waters I got for the girls. I think that put us in the best possible position for seeing what our legs could do in the final.”

Never mind that Jackson’s legs left her seven minutes off the pace off the winner on the 137-kilometre course that took the bulk of the riders most of four hours to traverse. Jackson, whose zest for life is regularly on display on the social-media feeds in which she’s more likely to break out in dance than she is to break down cycling’s nuances, seemed to consider the whole experience a bit of heaven. As an all-round athlete raised on a grain farm and bison ranch in Vermilion, Alta. — she remembers bottle-feeding calves shunned from the herd — she said she’d been touched by the support of friends and family back home.

“I’m still buzzing from being able to call myself an Olympian,” she said. “For my family and friends, to see what I do, and to see it at the Olympics, on the biggest stage there is, is also really special. Having a professional-athlete career is unique. And sometimes it’s hard for everyone in your life understand the kind of schedule, the kind of lifestyle that I have. So to be here, it just wraps that all up really nicely. So to be here, to make my family, my friends and Canada proud — all those things are just really special. “

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Really special, and also amazingly fleeting. Less than a week after she arrived in Tokyo, Jackson, as per the mandate of organizers, was slated to be on a flight home Monday morning.

“I’ll take a virtual tour of Mount Fuji, or something,” she quipped.

Even so, she’s dreaming of a more thorough introduction to Paris, France in 2024, when she’s hoping to find her way onto Canada’s team at the next summer Games.

“This experience, as brief as it was, really just shows me that I belong here and I’m good — I’m a good bike racer. And it’s given me confidence for setting my next set of goals,” she said. “I just hope I get a little more notice for Paris.”

Dave Feschuk is a Toronto-based sports columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @dfeschuk