It’s more that time, as everyone learns, passes by in a flash, and there are days when she, like everyone over a certain age, looks at the number and thinks: wait, when did that happen? It’s not that she’s uncomfortable talking about it, not that she wants to keep it quiet. "I felt like I was still getting better."Īs the weeks passed, the age thing came up, again and again. "I just wasn’t ready to retire," she says. Even when she decided to play this quadrennial, the calculation was simpler than counting birthdays. It threw her, a bit: it’s not like she was walking around with her own age at the top of her mind. In fact, she only learned about it from reporters, minutes after her victory over Tracy Fleury in the trials final. And if Jones reaches the podium in Beijing - it will take a battle to get there, in this field - she will be the oldest woman to earn a medal in any Olympic winter sport, for any nation, ever.īut the skip herself hadn’t really thought about it. There’s something about those milestones that feels right, in a way: after collecting one of everything there is to win in her sport, an endurance prize or two seems deserving. What’s funny, she explains, is that other people are thinking about it more than she ever has.Įven before she’d walked out of the arena at the Olympic trials in Saskatoon, media were proclaiming her curious new place in history: at 47, she had become the oldest Canadian female winter Olympian, edging just past fellow Manitoba-born curler Carolyn Darbyshire-McRorie, who was 46 when she earned silver in 2010 playing second for Cheryl Bernard.Īnd if Jones reaches the podium in Beijing - it will take a battle to get there, in this field - she will be the oldest woman to earn a medal in any Olympic winter sport, for any nation, ever. Or, for lack of a better phrase: the age thing. What was on my mind was more about Jones, and a new record she’s set, and the way it’s been talked about. But that’s not what I called to talk about, a few days before she leads her team onto the ice Thursday in Beijing. So that’s a quintessentially 2022 story, a jumble of surveillance technology, epidemiology and elite sport. Michael Burns Photo / Curling Canada filesĪt 47, Jennifer Jones has become the oldest Canadian female winter Olympian. I was like, ‘oh my God, how can it tell?’" "It saw me, and it stopped, and it said ‘please put your mask over your nose.’ So I put it back on, it takes another look at me and, whoosh, robot’s off. "It’s funny, because I was like ‘oh, there’s a robot,’ and I wanted to take a video for my kids," Jones says, chatting from her room in Beijing’s Olympic Village. Wait, just to be clear: did she just say she got reprimanded by a robot? Beautiful in that the venues are "perfect," she says strange in the daily PCR tests, the being surrounded by people after two months in near-isolation, and the time she lowered her N95 mask to take a sip of water and the robot drove by to chastise her. It’s been a few days since Jennifer Jones landed in Beijing, and so far her Olympics has been beautiful and strange.
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