BEIJING 2022
SACRIFICE in sport is always a coveted tale. The privations endured by those who reach the top are usually fascinating, and that is especially so when it comes to those who excel against the odds. The suffering of the successful is never in silence, but instead provides a context for their triumphs.
The lead-up to this year’s summer Olympics in Paris will allow brilliant stories to be told about athletes who are not household names, but who have made everything in their lives secondary to their sporting ambition.
Getting to the biggest show on earth makes their sacrifices feel worthwhile, and gives them an enormous platform, as even the casual fan knows what the Olympics are and what they mean.
But what of those who push to the limit and whose efforts will never lead the news bulletins or fill the back pages?
Elsa Desmond is a 26-year-old A&E doctor, who works in a hospital in Southend on England’s south-east coast. She is English born and reared, but with Irish grandparents and strong connections to Cavan and Cork.
She is also an Irish Olympian, having competed in the luge at the Winter Olympics in Beijing in 2022.
Elsa spends four months each autumn and winter competing around the globe in luge World Cup events, living out of a suitcase and knowing she will not trouble the heavyweight contenders from those countries traditionally strongest in the sport, the likes of Germany, Austria, Italy and the US.
She does this almost entirely using her own resources, working eight months of the year as a medic, to finance her winter passion. It’s not done for glory, or attention, or for the enthusiastic offers of sponsors — in fact, she doesn’t have one, but is tirelessly seeking support.
She does it because as a sixyear-old, she saw luge on TV during the 2006 Winter Olympics and decided she wanted to do that. And she did.
Luge is one of the sliding sports in the winter sports canon, along with the skeleton and the bobsleigh. Athletes compete on the same track used for those events, icy, hurtling chutes up to a kilometre long and which include up to 16 corners. In the luge, competitors start sitting on their sled, propel themselves forward and eventually lie back, reaching speeds of up to 140km per hour.
It makes for a thrilling sight, one of those infrequently glimpsed curiosities that we might watch once every four years.
For Elsa, it is, along with medicine, one of the two great passions of her life.
Her years of effort are narrowing towards the next Winter Olympics, to be held in Milan in 2026. That remains her goal, despite the enormous upset and frustration she felt at a recent World Cup event, when a change in the schedule left Elsa and other athletes from smaller countries feeling like also-rans or irritants.
It prompted a powerful social media post from Elsa, in which she criticised the conduct of the International Luge Federation (FIL), the sport’s governing body, and in which she revealed, ‘I feel tired of fighting, I feel defeated and I feel unwanted’.
The reason for her frustration was quite technical, and involved the schedule around World Cup events.
‘When we race, you do a Nations Cup race on a Friday,’ she explains. ‘It counts for World Cup points, but it’s how you then qualify for the World Cup race, which is on the weekend.
‘So the Friday race is never televised, but it is a way of earning points and then qualifying. What happens is then you get into the World Cup race on the weekend, which is 30 athletes.
‘What we’ve always had is that the slowest athlete goes off first, and the fastest athlete goes off last.’
That changed at an event last month, when the bottom ten athletes, including Elsa, were cut from the second run. Organisers invoked an emergency rule to make the change, citing the conditions. After protests, the smaller countries were eventually facilitated, but in a way that Elsa is still clearly infuriated by as she relates the story. They were allowed to race after the stars had competed; not only that, but after the stars had gone home.
‘They had their televised run, they had their medal ceremony, and then after that we got our second run,’ she recalls. ‘It was not televised, we did not have a commentator at the track, spectators had left, it was very much disrespectful to us as athletes that they effectively finished the race, but then were like, “You guys complained about not getting your second run, so here’s your second run”.’
Whether the change becomes permanent depends on a congress to be held during the summer, when rule changes are decided upon, but for Elsa, it was the culmination of her experiences of competing as an athlete from a minnow country, and what she believes is better treatment for those representing the big nations.
‘My race that week, I did not race well,’ she says now. ‘I think because my background is as a doctor, I think I’m very good at compartmentalising in terms of emotion and keeping that away from affecting performance. However, obviously it was a huge challenge, particularly as I was someone that did decide to speak out about it, and it definitely took a toll on me in terms of my performance for that week.
‘I think now it’s not having such an impact, because I’ve spoken to my sports psychologist and we’ve gone over it. But particularly as someone who runs a federation, the future of this sport for small countries is something that really does worry me.’
That last sentence includes a remarkable detail, but it only illustrates more vividly what Elsa has done to compete at the highest level of this obscure sport that enchanted her as a child.
In January 2021, she became the first woman to represent Ireland in luge in international competi
THE FUTURE OF THIS SPORT FOR SMALL COUNTRIES REALLY DOES WORRY ME
THERE ARE A LOT OF COSTS THAT I STILL HAVE TO PAY FOR MYSELF