SOUNDTRACKED BY BREATHLESS hysterics from the BBC commentary box, we learned about the life and times of Jenny Jones last weekend.
Her bronze in the women’s slopestyle snowboarding was remarkable for many reasons, not least because it was Britain’s first Olympic medal on snow.
At 33 Jones is far older than her most of her rivals and more than twice the age of the other snowboarder whose exploits turned Irish eyes towards Sochi this week, 16-year-old Seamus O’Connor, born in San Diego but eligible to represent Ireland through his grandparents.
Together, O’Connor’s success at his debut Olympics — he finished 15th and 17th in his respective disciplines — and the story of Jones, who started out her career on plastic slopes, point the way forward for snowsports in Ireland.
Much has been made of the unique fact that Ireland’s team in Sochi is made up entirely of diaspora athletes. Only one of the five, cross-country skiier Jan Rossiter, was born in Ireland while the others (O’Connor, Conor Lyne, Victoria Bell and Sean Greenwood) qualify through their family roots.
But while it may be the “foreign legion” flying the flag this time, there is plenty of homegrown talent making the grade too. Hubert Gallagher, 19, has already represented Ireland at the Alpine World Championships while Dublin skiier Cormac Comerford, 17, met the Olympic qualification standard and is expected to compete at the Junior World Championships later this month.
Comerford is a textbook example of the path followed by most aspiring Irish athletes, starting out on the dry slopes of the Ski Club in Kiltiernan before gradually progressing.
It was the same for Shane O’Connor, a Vancouver Olympian himself four years ago and now the Alpine development officer with the Snowsports Association of Ireland (SAI), the body tasked with growing and developing all strands of the sport.
Third-level students flock to Kiltiernan during ski season, as do the holidaymakers in preparation for the real stuff of the European slopes, but there’s also a dedicated core of 200 or so members there, many of whom are training with a view to racing.
Another all-weather slope is due to open in the Glen Resource Centre, Cork this summer following a €21,000 investment by the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport while Sandyford’s Ski Centre has an indoor ‘treadmill’ slope.
“Most people in Ireland would tend to start up in the Ski Club in some shape or form,” O’Connor explains.
“At some point they would decide to commit to a more extensive bout of snow skiing. That’s where they would develop the expertise that would allow them to compete at an international level.
“In the past you were able to do the bulk of your training up at the Ski Club and be at a level where you could represent Ireland, but now the standard has gone so high from the skiiers that we have, that doesn’t cut the mustard any more.”
He mentions Patrick McMillan, another young skiier who has recently moved to Austria to train. Dry slopes can only take Ireland’s best so far.
“You can get to a level quite quickly where if you’re really serious about competition skiing, you really need to go away, whether that’s multiple trips in a year or going for a couple of months,” O’Connor continues.
“If you don’t invest that time, and there’s obviously the financial expense as well, you’re not going to develop.”
If proper access to snow is an issue, so is funding. This is one sporting dream which forces athletes — and their parents — to dig particularly deep, ensuring the numbers who persevere to make it to an elite level remain low.
There is some support from the Irish Sports Council while Ireland can also tap into help from the International Ski Federation (FIS) who run annual camps targeted at emerging ski nations, “the places that don’t have natural resources for skiing or history in it.”
Maybe the real Irish potential lies in the freestyle events following the addition of slopestyle snowboarding and skiing to the Olympics for the first time this year. Take Jones’s historic medal and the performance of two other GB athletes, James ‘Woodsy’ Woods and Katie Summerhayes (fifth and seventh respectively in slopestyle skiing), as proof of what can be done starting out on dry slopes.
The sums of central investment in UK Sport are significantly bigger: £14 million was spent to prepare their 56-athlete team for Sochi while £1.1 million was invested in the GO SKI GO BOARD campaign to encourage people to try the sport.
But Ireland’s strong links with the British freeski scene can only help. GB coach Pat Sharples has been running his famous Salomon Grom camps in Ireland since 2009; Woods and Summerhayes are two of his star pupils.
The explosion of freestyle skiing has seen it eat into snowboarding’s traditional stronghold in recent years but in Ireland at least, O’Connor says, snowboarding is still growing fast.
Whether or not the success of his namesake Seamus (the two are no relation) translates to a swell in Irish interest remains to be seen.
“Hopefully we can leverage his experience,” O’Connor says, “whether that’s sending people out to boarding camps with him or bringing him over for camps in the summer. He’s hugely keen.”
If nothing else, this week’s show in Sochi has painted an encouraging picture for those who are dreaming big.
