Noemie Fox's Olympic debut alongside her sister Jessica is especially poignant for Australian chef de mission Anna Meares.
The Olympic team boss was near tears on Sunday in Paris, immediately after speaking about her own sibling near-miss at the Games.
Just as the Fox sisters compete in canoe and kayak slalom, Meares and her older sister Kerrie once dominated the sprint events in Australian track cycling.
Kerrie's career was highlighted by two gold medals at the 2002 Commonwealth Games and runner-up in the sprint that year at the world championships.
She and Anna regularly went head-to-head in the early 2000s at domestic and international events.
But there was only one spot in the Olympic track cycling team for women's sprint events at the 2004 and '08 Games.
By the time the track cycling schedule was overhauled to have more women's events at the London Games, Kerrie had retired.
Anna rode at four Olympics between 2004-16, winning two gold medals and carrying the Australian flag at the Rio opening ceremony.
"Kerrie and I came through competing for opportunities to go to the Olympic Games in an era where we didn't have equal opportunity ... in terms of the events we could compete in," Meares said.
"We had to compete against each other for the Athens and Beijing campaign. Kerrie unfortunately retired in 2009, didn't get to experience being an Olympian, and that change came through later ... leading into London.
"The event calendar changed and we had the equal opportunity, you could take two sprinters."
After winning gold at the Tokyo Olympics, Jessica is competing at her fourth Games and Noemie will make her debut.
"So unfortunate timing for where we are (herself and Kerrie), in both loving the same sport and I think it's just so incredibly special for this sibling set, but also the family," Meares said of the Fox sisters.
"It's pretty amazing to sit here and know both of them can be Olympians and members of the Australia Olympic team."
More broadly, the imbalance in numbers was improving at the Beijing Games and in Paris, the International Olympic Committee says 28 of the 32 sports will be fully gender equal.
Noemie joked she no longer has to wear Jessica's hand-me-down Australian Olympic team clothing.
Jessica and Meares were on the Australian teams at the 2012 and '16 Olympics, with Fox saying the track cycling great was an idol of hers.
She remembered Meares as a very approachable teammate - except on the days when the famously focused sprinter was competing.
As Fox sat in between Meares and Noemie at Sunday's Australian team media conference, she was asked what the Olympics meant to her.
"That term - once an Olympian, always an Olympian - you carry that with you forever," Fox said.
"What we're about to experience in the next couple of weeks, it just gives me the tingles and that's the Olympics - it just gives you energy you really can't find anywhere else."
She added having Noemie as a teammate had given her a fresh perspective.
"What's so special about Noemie, being her first Games, is that I'm also seeing everything for the first time through her 'lens'," Jessica said of her younger sister.
