Everyone falls at the Winter Olympics. Every athlete is a number in a simple equation – gravity plus snow and ice equals down, down, down. Skiing is falling with sticks on your feet, figure skating is falling on knives. The trick is the level of control and style you apply to the way you do it. Nowhere is this more true than in the luge.
A week from Monday, Elsa Desmond will take her place at the top of the Xiaohaituo Bobsleigh and Luge Track in Beijing. She will sit on her sled and grab the start poles either side. She will rock back and forth three times before submitting to gravity. She will paddle the track three times, using the metal spikes on her gloves to propel herself. Then she will lie back and attempt to put some sort of manners on a 120km/h plunge down the 16 corners and 1,065 metres to the finish.
Luge is a thrill ride. Luge is demented. Luge is, as Jerry Seinfeld put it, "the only sport where you could have people competing in it against their will and it would be exactly the same". So how does a 24-year-old medical doctor with no government funding end up being Ireland's first ever Olympic luger? Surely there are handier ways to get an adrenaline rush?
I think the beauty of the Olympics is that it's the best of what each country can put forward. We are going there to represent who we are on this global stage
“I still wonder that myself a lot of days,” Desmond says. “Why have I committed so much to this when I have a perfectly good house and a perfectly good career at home? I do wonder it myself.
“I think as a kid I saw the Olympics as such a beautiful thing. People coming from all around the world and you’re uniting everyone from every background and there’s all these cultures and they’re all in this one place for this one thing that they love which is sport. And I think from a young age I just never let go of that.”
If that sounds like an exaggeration or a conveniently dreamy packaging of her personal history, well, know this. After watching the Turin Winter Olympics in 2006, Elsa Desmond told her schoolteacher that she would one day go and do that. Not that she would like to, not that she hoped to. She straight up said she had been watching the luge and she was going to go to the Winter Olympics one day.
The teacher laughed. Of course she did. For one thing, Elsa was eight at the time. For another, they weren't at school in the Swiss mountains or the Canadian tundra. They were in Maidenhead, one of those terribly pleasant riverside towns that keeps London fed with commuters. It would have been hard to fathom a longer road to the top of an Olympic luge track.
“I’m a very persistent person when I want to be,” Desmond says. “When I set my mind to something I am going to do it. So I set my mind to medicine and now I’m a doctor. I’m not even sure entirely why I set my mind to luge instead of bobsleigh or skeleton or another winter sport.
"But I think it was really because there was no one to use as a role model. There was no female luger in GB, there was no one from Ireland. And basically because I didn't see myself represented, I was going to represent me. And I just made that decision at that age and stuck to it for a very long time.
“You’re performing at the highest level of what your country can do. To me, it’s not about the people who are going to win the medals. I know a lot of people think that it should only be the best who get to go, that the competitions should be restricted to the actual best 30 in the world no matter where they come from.
“But I think the beauty of the Olympics is that it’s the best of what each country can put forward. We are going there to represent who we are on this global stage. I just think there’s something magical in that. I think that’s what I saw as an eight-year-old when I wasn’t aware of the political side of the games and all the tensions that come with the Olympics. I just saw that and that’s what I wanted.”
It took a while to get going, obviously enough. Not a lot of luge at the school sports day. Desmond was in her early teens by the time her dad spotted a place going at a British Army camp that was offering slots for winter sports novices. She got in and got going and never looked back. She played hockey and rugby to a decent level and was a champion swimmer as well. But it was luge that connected with her on a wavelength the other sports couldn't locate.
Desmond rose through the ranks and was in the British system by the time she was 18. She doesn’t shy away from the fact that her intention at the time was to compete for Team GB when the Olympics came around. But a coaching change in 2019 didn’t work out for her and she decided to switch allegiances to start representing Ireland.
There's no foul play. You don't touch each other's sled. You don't sabotage anyone. You are supportive of each other because you really only have each other
"My grandmother was from Cavan – Ballyjamesduff and Castlerahan is where we would go when I was a kid in the summertime. My grandfather is from Cork, hence the Desmond name. I'm not secretive about the fact that I started my career with GB.
“They had a federation – and when I was starting out, that was the way into the sport. You needed a country with a federation and so that was who I had the option with. But there was always an option with Ireland as well. Great Britain had a coaching change and that athlete-coach relationship is so vitally important and it just didn’t click with the new coach. And that’s okay, sometimes that happens. So we just took the decision that that was the time to move.”
Just to be clear, she wasn’t dashing the dreams of an up-and-coming Irish luger by switching over. Nor was she feasting on some of that sweet, sweet government funding. There was no Irish luge team before she declared herself it. There was – and remains – no Sport Ireland money. Like the other five athletes competing under the Irish banner in the coming weeks, Desmond’s road to Beijing has been entirely self-financed. Oh yes, and she went to college and got her medical degree while doing so.
She has poured thousands of her own pounds into clawing her way up the rankings, into transport, equipment, coaching, analysis, the whole bit. Competing for Ireland allowed her to be part of the sport's Small Countries Group, whereby lugers from countries as diverse as Moldova, Bulgaria, Taiwan and others club together to chase a limited number of Olympic spots. They live together half the year, travelling en masse, sharing everything from coaches to food to bedrooms. And then they try to beat each other out of their dreams.
“I spent the last 16 weeks sharing with the athlete from Bulgaria who unfortunately isn’t going to be at the games. So you end up getting really close to these people. We are directly competing for these places. We are all of a very similar level because we haven’t got the sled technology of the bigger nations and we haven’t got the years of experience of the other athletes who started in the luge when they were six years old. So we all have this respect for the fact that you can compete on the ice but you are there for each other when you’re not.
“There’s no foul play. You don’t touch each other’s sled. You don’t sabotage anyone. You are supportive of each other because you really only have each other. We all wanted all of us to get there. Unfortunately because of the way the numbers work out, that couldn’t happen. We all wanted it though because we are all friends.
“It’s slightly different for some of these small nations in that most of them are funded in some way or other. I am not funded. They aren’t putting their financial wellbeing on the line in the same way that I have had to. Their federations pay for their travel and accommodation and various other things for them. The have the ability to do this in a way that I don’t.
“A lot of these athletes from smaller nations are younger and they do it for one Olympic cycle and then they get on with their lives. It’s a bit different for me because I am self-funded. I feel I have a responsibility to build up the Irish federation to the point where funding can be a real prospect for athletes in the future.”
That future starts now. The women’s single luge gets going a week from Monday, just before midday Irish time. Of the 35 athletes competing, she is likely to finish in front of no more than half a dozen of them on a very good day. But that’s not really the point. The point is she is there, where she said she’d be.
“For me, the big aim was always 2026,” she says. “I have been competing internationally for four years. So 2022 was something we wanted to try for but it wasn’t something we expected to achieve. We wanted to go through the experience of getting Olympic qualification, we wanted to get an understanding of it to build for the future. So the fact that we are here is such a massive achievement. And still it hasn’t really sunk in.
“So for me, these games are going to be about getting experience on that world stage and everything that goes around a big event. Usually when I compete, you go, you race, you leave. I do a sport where a couple of hundred people watch the big races. The small races that I sometimes do, the crowd is normally around 12 people.
“And now we’re going to have millions of people watching on TV and whether I am conscious of that or not, it’s definitely going to be in my head somewhere. So it’s getting comfortable with all of that so that in four years’ time, I can go out and really perform and show what Ireland luge is capable of doing. So these games, success will be three clean, solid runs. And that will get me the ranking it will get me.”
