Jessica Crisp
‘An Australian great in sailboarding with four Olympic Games appearances and multiple world titles over an extraordinary career which has spanned more than 40 years and is still going strong. A trailblazer in the sport, she was also the first Australian to win the highly competitive World Cup Sailboarding series in 1993 and then again in 1994.’
Jessica Crisp is a four-time Olympian and a pioneer in the sport of sailboarding.
An inspiration to a generation of Australian sailors, Crisp has spent a lifetime competing and winning, at the top level of international competition.
The daughter of John and Carmel Crisp, Crisp’s father set the trajectory as the co-owner and crew of the ocean racing yacht Impetuous when it was a member of the winning Australian team in the 1979 Admiral’s Cup in England.
Taking up sailing at the age of 10, Crisp’s talent was evident from her first regatta win at the 1981 VASC Sabot club championships.
She quickly moved on to sailboarding and was selected at just 14 to represent Australia at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games where windsurfing was a demonstration sport.
She won consecutive Youth World titles in 1986 and 1987 in the Mistral class, with the second won on her home waters at Botany Bay.
In 1986 she was crowned the World Windsurfing champion, an unprecedented feat for a 16-year-old.
She would repeat this feat in 1989 before embarking on her professional windsurfing career.
It was a career that would make her one of the most recognised women in the world of windsurfing.
In 1993 the Sydney sailing talent became the first Australian - male or female - to win the highly competitive Professional Windsurfing Association's World Cup Sailboarding Series. She would go on to repeat the feat in 1994, this time despite the pain of a broken ankle which she sustained towards the end of the season.
At the time she was hailed the best all round female windsurfer in the world.
But after breaking fibula and tibia doing a forward loop at the indoor event in Paris, her professional career was cut short. Unable to jump and therefore compete in wave sailing competitions, Crisp decided to turn her attention back to Olympic sailing.
There she would be selected as Australia’s windsurfing representative at the next four Olympic Games finishing fifth on the Mistral board at the Sydney 2000 Games, sixth in the same class at Athens in 2004, fifth again in the RS:X windsurfer class at the Beijing 2008 Games and then as a 42-year-old she finished 11 overall at London Olympics in 2012.
During this run she won the Australian Sailing Female Sailor of the Year Award in 2000 and a World Championship bronze medal in 2007.
Crisp has remained active in the sport she loves and in 2022 won the International Windsurfing Tour’s Aloha Classic at 53.