Snowboarder O’Connor back in the loop after knee trauma
GETTING a five-ring tattoo is a rite of passage now for modern-day Olympians, the stamp of honour for joining world sport’s most exclusive club.
Yet you won’t find one on Seamus O’Connor, the Californian-born second-generation Irish snowboarding prodigy who made his Winter Olympics debut in Sochi four years ago. There are two good reasons. First, because he was only 16 then and being chaperoned by his father Kevin, who is firmly anti-tattoos.
Secondly, O’Connor, appearance-wise, is still the antithesis of his counter-culture sport, a clean-cut kid in an environment where bodyart and piercings and are practically the norm.
Prodigies are also increasingly normal in snowboarding where the elites are either teenagers or kidults.
O’Connor was sponsored by Nike when he was only 13. He made Olympic history in Sochi 2014 as its youngest male snowboarder but that is no longer unusual.
Youth helps in a sport that’s physically highly attritional and where flexibility, flair and fearlessness are king.
O’Connor made two semi-finals in Sochi and finished 15th in halfpipe and 17th in slope-style yet left disappointed.
“Slopestyle was great, I did a ‘triple Cork’ which was a new trick and massive for me,” he reflects.
But he was gutted to fall on the last trick of his half-pipe semi-final run: “My goal was to make the final and it was a trick I can do in my sleep.”
Afterwards he had a month’s holiday in Ireland with his Russian mum and English-born dad (whose parents came from Drogheda and Dublin) which included a cruise on the Shannon.
And then reality hit.
“I was a little bit bummed out when I got home (to San Diego) and normality struck. I still had a year and a half of High School left so it took some getting used to.”
Post-Olympic ennui would not prove to be O’Connor’s toughest challenge.
His prodigious trajectory continued in 2015 when he finished 10th and 13th at the World Championships in Austria but, in September 2016, disaster struck at the season’s first World Cup in New Zealand. “I came off the wall too high and landed right flat in the bottom of the half-pipe. I tore ACL (cruciate ligament), MCL (medial) and damaged cartilage, the whole nine yards!”
Even getting home was problematic as doctors wouldn’t let him travel for two weeks, putting him on blood thinners for fear of clotting.
He had surgery back home in October 2016 and he didn’t compete again for a full year, in the same event last September.
He lost some of his sponsors during his tough year out but the social isolation was worst.
“All my best friends are snowboarders. I felt out of the loop, excluded from that world I’ve always been in. That was the hardest thing, missing the people and the atmosphere,” O’Connor reveals.
“But then I moved back to Park City (Utah) where I usually train, and took up a job judging regional snowboard competitions. I wanted to remain somewhat in that world so worked with a couple of friends and the United States Snowboard Association. That was cool. It was a very different perspective but kept me involved.”
At 18 he genuinely feared it was all over.
“There’s that moment in every athlete’s career where you suffer injury and think, ‘I might not get back?’”
“But being injured gave me a lot of time to think and realise this is what I really want to do. It’s honestly given me more motivation than ever.”
It left him playing catch-up for Olympic qualification so he has dropped slopestyle to just concentrate on half-pipe for the moment.
He finishing 12th in China before Christmas and 15th in another World Cup in Laax, Switzerland last month.
Re-finding that form just a year after a full knee reconstruction is extraordinary and the Irish snowboarder who made international headlines and Irish and Olympic snowboard history in 2014 is now back where he belongs.
Olympic Half-Pipe qualification takes place on Feb 13 (4.0-5.30am Irish time); Final on Feb 14 (1.30-3.0am Irish time)