Staring into the fear
Stephen Barry talks to UCC student Patrick O’Brien about his second life, racing on ice.“As soon as my name is announced, my helmet is on and everything else is blacked out. You’ve people there ringing cowbells; you don’t hear any of that. You’re on the start block and you’re staring down over the crest of the hill. You’re staring into the fear. There are no brakes on a sled.“Once you start pushing, you’re totally committed. You’re on the sled and you’re there until the very end, provided you don’t flip on one of the corners and crash. It’s insane. You’re standing at the top and you know you have to go.”Racing at 80 miles an hour with your chin an inch from the ice, doing something that “scares the shit out of you” seems completely unnatural. The fact that the forebodingly named 'skeleton event' happens on ice only enhances the sensation.
"You’re on the sled and you’re there until the very end, provided you don’t flip on one of the corners and crash. It’s insane."
Indeed, when coming back from a winter of competing in Calgary, Patrick O’Brien cut an equally unnatural sight: a Hulk-like figure, his arms turning green with aging bruises seared to his body from cushioning high-speed impacts with walls of ice. His broad shoulders mean much of the ice’s cold punishment is inflicted directly to his body, while his skeleton whisks him through the steep tunnel.The Kilkenny student’s turn as a skeleton racer, making his way inside the world’s top-100 a year and a half after being brought along to his first trial, is a remarkable tale.He admits he has a physique that isn’t traditional for the skeleton but the Irish federation began looking for more explosive athletes, those who can offer speed backed up with extra weight for momentum. “We train like Olympic weightlifters, powerlifters and sprinters,” notes O’Brien, who restarted his gym-work last week, looking ahead eight months until his next race when winter comes around again.The sport initially grabbed him a decade ago, following it year after year since the 2006 Winter Olympics. “When I saw this on TV it caught me: ‘it looks fast, it looks dangerous, it’s racing with no engine.’ You’re what generates the power.”
“We train like Olympic weightlifters, powerlifters and sprinters.”
“Speed and danger were just a part of growing up for me,” he adds, remembering his rooting in motorsport. Sean Greenwood, a Winter Olympian from last year, brought him up to the trials and, soon after, O’Brien had dropped almost everything else, giving an eight-year commitment to the sport.As with the majority of his training, the trials were conducted oceans away from ice or snow, with the simple reasoning that, “If you can run on land, they think you can run on ice,” guiding the selection.Eventually, after much preparation, a trip to race school followed, with O’Brien, like all of those new to the icy arena, let off halfway down the track: “You pinball off of every wall the whole way down. You leave chunks of skin on walls and you’re bruised but, when you get to the end, you’re like ‘that was unbelievable, I want to do it again!’”A few days later you are allowed go from the top, with the increased speed causing the same pinball effect. In the rush all peripheral vision is gone; the constant focus levelled on controlling entry points into each corner and avoiding getting lost in the gale of white. It’s a sport of physics, power and split-second reactions, where any misread can lead to a head-first crash, leaving you catapulting down the track until it levels at the end.However O’Brien has largely avoided the latter scenario, tapping into the speed control ingrained in him from his motorcycling past and adapting to the small head steers needed to control his direction.Now back on less slippery sod, his immediate priority is to buy a replacement sled and start testing his relationship with it: “You’ve got a connection with it or you don’t… it’s intimate and it’s weird.”The former Students’ Union Education Officer also has to deal with the backlog of work for his Maters in Planning, before trying to find a job, “one that has a lot of annual leave!”Should he reach the World Championships in Austria this time next year, as he expects to, that leave may well be needed.