Liam Jegou: Finding His Flow on the Road to LA

Liam Jegou is already part of a pretty exclusive club as one of only 24 paddlers to represent Ireland in the Olympic Games since Ann McQuaid and Gerry Collins made history in Munich 54 years ago. Since then just four – Eoin Rheinisch, Ian Wiley, Declan Burns and Ian Pringle – have been triple Olympians and Jegou is hoping to match that in Los Angeles 2028.

His near perfect run in the C1 final in Paris, where just a touch on the final gate cost him his medal dream, left him seventh overall, a big jump from 15^th on his Olympic debut in Tokyo. Qualifying for his first two Games was based largely on performances at World and European Championships but consistency across the qualifying period will now be rewarded.

The C1 slalom Olympic ranking system for LA2028 has been altered to now include specified World Cup events and, as a 30-year-old with vast experience on the international circuit, that should really suit Jegou, as his recent form demonstrates. He has just finished his 2026 season on a high, taking seventh place in last month’s (Sept) World Cup Final in la Seu d’Urgell in Catalonia, which also helped him finished sixth overall on the 2026 World Cup rankings.

He also finished eighth at the European Championships last month and, while they no longer count towards Olympic qualification, that was another big boost to his confidence, which had dipped in the aftermath of his 2024 heroics.

“Paris was a very good Olympics for me, I came very close to a phenomenal result but I had a hard time the following season,” 

he admits.

“I can’t explain why, maybe it was a delayed response afterwards but last year was a difficult one on the water. Thankfully, I seem to have fixed things, and I had a blast this year.

“When things aren’t going right it’s easier to change everything because you’re not worried about breaking anything,”

he notes.

“I reflected on what went wrong last season, made a few technical changes and trained, physically, a little bit differently too. I managed to be a little bit more free in the way I raced and it paid off.” 

The new Olympic qualification system in C1 slalom has three-phases. 

Olympic rankings provide the most important one, qualifying the first 10 nations initially before two standalone qualifying competitions (one global, one continental). Olympic rankings will now be based on an athlete’s best five results across nine specified competitions across two seasons. These include the two World Championships (2026 and 2027) and seven ICF World Cup events.

Jegou’s seventh place at last month’s World Cup final earned him 770 points and has left him 14^th  (and the ninth nation) after the first three of the nine ranking events for LA2028.

“Qualifying for the past two Olympic Games was very much about being good on the day at Worlds and Europeans but now they’ve switched it up. Qualifying started this summer at the World Championships in Oklahoma (where he was 29^th) and goes all the way to the last World Cup event next season in Alabama (Montgomery),” 

he explains.

“It was great to get that one very good result from the World Cup final but there’s still a long way to go and qualification is always going to go right down to the last races always,”

he cautions.

Jegou was also boosted by his performance at Europeans last month.

“That was actually my first European Championship final so I was delighted. I had a great run in semi-finals and my final run was good as well, I just picked up two small touches that pushed me down but I felt like I had had a bit more in me so I’m very motivated after this season.”

Getting to compete on the 2028 Olympic course in Oklahoma, which hosted this year’s World Championships in July, was important for acclimatisation alone.

“It was very, very hot, close to 40 degrees Celsius!” 

he explains.

We’re lucky because we compete in the water so heat doesn’t usually impact us as much as other athletes but the water in Oklahoma was actually boiling too. I was completely caught off guard by it.”

Jegou lives in Pau, France and has the typically peripatetic lifestyle of an elite paddler. But, since 2025, Canoeing Ireland has looked to consolidate its increased number of international-class athletes through a more centralised high performance programme. That means Jegou is far less isolated and he’s already enjoying the new system.

“We meet up for training camps all around Europe, sometimes in Slovenia, sometimes Paris, sometimes Dublin. We move around a lot because we need access to whitewater courses and, because of the way the qualification system is going to work next year, we need to spend time on all the (World Cup) courses.

“But we do quite a bit of training camps and testing at the Institute (of Sport) in Dublin and I was actually back loads this year.

“Canoeing is an individual sport but the team environment is really important for us as well and it’s nice now to have a good group of partners in Ireland to train and travel with.

“I spent my whole career pretty much traveling on my own, walking around with a 3.50 metre boat, banging into people, trying to fit my boat into airport shuttles and stuff like that.

“Now we’re doing it together. We all travelled to World Championships together from Dublin, which was really nice, You’re travelling and training with people now who understand what you’re going through and there’s also a bit of crack as well.”

He’s not only delighted to be leading Canoeing Ireland’s new wave but been inspired too by Team Ireland achievements elsewhere in 2026.

“I watched the European Athletics Championships on TV and it was so much fun watching our athletes do so well. It feels like Olympic sports are getting more and more popular in Ireland and it’s so nice to see different sports getting more and more successful.”