ICE BREAKERS
Jason Branagan’s knowledge of bobsleigh was limited to the Christmas showings of Cool Runnings until he decided to delve into Ireland’s remarkable history with the sport...
‘THERE WAS A REAL RISK AND DANGER TO WHAT THEY WERE DOING’
IN February 2018, just before the last Winter Olympics in Pyeong-Chang, Jason Branagan was reading a newspaper article about the small team of Irish athletes travelling to South Korea when a line caught his eye. ‘It was just a throwaway line, saying that 2018 should be the 30th anniversary of the first Irish athletes to compete at the Winter Olympics, but the bobsleigh team who qualified for the Games in 1988 didn’t go because the OCI [Olympic Council of Ireland] didn’t sanction them. That got me thinking that there must be a story there.’
Branagan wondered why officials would not send an Irish team who had broken new ground in qualifying for the Olympics. As he started digging for more information, the potential for a decent sports documentary became obvious.
‘The extent of my knowledge when it came to bobsleigh was Cool Runnings, which was on RTÉ pretty much every Christmas.
‘I was baffled that there was an Irish team competing against the Jamaicans and their story wasn’t known at all. I did some digging and the more I learnt about the story, the more I thought there was the potential for a good doc here and I didn’t want to be sitting at home in four or five years’ time, when a show about the Irish bobsleigh team comes on the television, thinking I had that idea.’
So, he started tracking down these Irish sporting pioneers. The result is Breaking Ice, Branagan’s first feature-length documentary, that tells their remarkable story.
It will have its European premiere at this year’s Galway Film Fleadh, which begins on Tuesday and is taking place online because of the pandemic.
The story centres on how in 1986, a London-Irish businessman Larry Treacy took it upon himself to form the Irish Bobsleigh and Luge Association, with the dream of qualifying for the 1988 Winter Olympics.
Recruiting elite rowers Pat McDonagh and Gerry Macken directly from the Henley Regatta where they had won, they set out on an unlikely journey.
One of the issues Branagan faced was sourcing footage. There was no national television coverage in the early days of Ireland’s bobsleigh team.
‘Fortunately, Terry McHugh (brakeman for the team) had a fair bit of footage because he was an international athlete, representing Ireland in the javelin and had a camcorder courtesy of a sponsor. So, he had a lot of tapes which he was able to give to me.’
Branagan struck gold with the protagonists. The likes of McHugh, McDonagh and Macken are all natural story-tellers who are comfortable in front of the camera and well able to articulate what part they played.
‘When we didn’t have a vast amount of archive or old footage, a huge part of the success of this film was going to come down to how these lads told their own story, how comfortable they were in front of the camera. It’s one of those things you have no control over as a filmmaker but we were very fortunate in that they are all incredibly personable and exceptional in articulating their story.’
In the 1980s, bobsleigh was one of the most dangerous sports in the world. As is pointed out in the documentary, there were three fatalities a year. ‘It was important to get that across. There was a real risk and danger to what they were doing. That is part of how bonkers the story was,’ Branagan says.
Pat McDonagh remembers training on one track with the British team and it was closed as a competitor had been decapitated in a crash beforehand.
‘I remember one of my first runs, I was asked what is your blood group?’ McHugh says at one point. ‘I was thinking why do they want that? They wanted to write it on the side of my helmet in case something bad happened.’
Gerry Macken points out that bobsleigh was a massive crowd-puller at the Winter Olympics because spectators wanted to see if something bad would happen. They were waiting for a spectacular crash. That was the sort of environment the novice Irish team had entered.
Despite all of that, the Irish team ended up being quite good. In their first event at Innisbruck in the Austrian Alps, they finished first and third in a competition for new nations. ‘We were good enough not to be worried that we were going to show up the country if we did go to the Olympics,’ Macken recalls.
Their encouraging early results did little to convince the OCI, though. Treacy had a meeting with officials as it looked promising that the team might qualify. ‘They told me straight out they were fed up with Irish athletes going to the Olympics and not doing very well.’
The thing is that the Irish bobsleigh team, less than two years in existence, made the Calgary Olympics on merit. They had to get into the top third of nations in qualifying and they managed it. ‘We proved that an Irish team could go to the Olympics,’ McDonagh states.
Except the OCI refused to budge. As Treacy and his team prepared to make history as Ireland’s first Winter Olympians, they got a letter from the OCI to say they wouldn’t be sending them. Even though Treacy tried to take out a court injunction, the 1988 Winter Olympics would not have an Irish bobsleigh team.
‘It was petty jealously and begrudgery,’ Cormac Smith, a brakeman in the early team, says in the documentary. And even at this remove, it seems odd that the OCI wouldn’t send a team that had qualified on merit. At those games, the Jamaican team became celebrities.
‘We knew the Jamaican athletes, great guys. We would have beers with them after races, but we always beat them in competition. But they were there and we weren’t,’ Smith says in the documentary.
The perception was that the Ireland team were just going to Calgary for a bit of craic when most of them were serious athletes in their own right. Treacy wouldn’t be deterred. Disappointed and angered
by the treatment of the team by the OCI, he immediately set his sights on the next Winter Games in the French city of Albertville.
McDonagh had been in the Seoul Summer Games, representing Ireland in rowing. He met McHugh, who was competing in javelin, and asked him to come to UCD for some trials for the Irish bobsleigh team. The plan to break ice and make history was coming together.
There was a changing of the guard in the OCI, too, which helped their cause. Pat Hickey had replaced Des O’Sullivan at the head of the organisation and he was seen as looking more favourably on an Irish team going to the Winter Games.
‘Pat Hickey was more receptive to a bobsleigh team and they were recruiting better athletes too,’ Branagan suggests. ‘Terry McHugh was a phenomenal athlete, he represented Ireland in six Olympics, four summer games and two winter games. With athletes of that stature involved, it was harder not to take it seriously.’
They were still competing on a shoestring. The athletes were their own support crew. They had to spend hours before competition preparing the runners on their sleigh.
McHugh remembered pulling up to one competition and seeing a massive articulated truck that was for the French team.
‘And the French wouldn’t be a power in bobsleigh. But they had this artic, with everything they needed inside – their own meals, beds to nap. And they had a support staff whereas it was just the six of us doing everything.’
But despite all the issues, the lack of resources and support, the Irish team qualified for the Olympics, even if the story passed much of the Irish public by. And in their maiden appearance at the Olympics, Ireland finished a respectable 36th out of 48 teams.
‘The resilience of everyone involved is what came across when I looked into this story,’ Branagan says. ‘Other people would have given up, especially after they qualified in 1988 but ran into a brick wall at official level.
‘But Larry’s doggedness and determination to get the team to the games shines through. He wouldn’t take no for an answer and there is this thread of resilience running through the whole narrative.
‘These guys kept getting knocked down and kept getting up. They were determined to prove that it wasn’t a few Irish guys who wanted to go to the Olympics for the craic, they wanted to compete.’ Branagan feels that the theme of durability and refusing to give up is what attracts so many film-makers to sporting documentaries.
‘There’s a lot in sport stories that resonate with documentary makers because they go through the same knockbacks and frustrations.’
Ten years after the bobsleigh team opened the door for Ireland’s Winter Games athletes, Clifton Wrottesley almost won a medal in the skeleton in Salt Lake City in 2002.
‘To go from where they were, from winter sports not being taken seriously by their own Olympic federation, to almost winning a medal 14 years later, that’s quite a lot of ground to cover in a short space of time and it was Larry Treacy who opened that door,’ Branagan says.
‘As Cormac Smith suggests in the film, he is the godfather of Irish bobsleigh — and probably Irish winter sports.’
*Breaking Ice will premiere at the Galway Film Fleadh on July 12th, followed by a Q&A with Jason Branagan, the director, and members of the Irish bobsleigh team of 1992.