SKATE EXPECTATIONS
Elite preparation in South Korea is steeling Irishman for glory on the rink
LIAM O’BRIEN has just finished another exhausting day on the rink when his smiling face appears on the computer screen all the way from the city of Seongnam in South Korea. It’s almost nine on Thursday evening and he’s looking forward to some rest. Not that he will get that much. By five the following morning, O’Brien will be up again, preparing for another day on the ice.
When the World Speed Skating Championships start in the Netherlands on Friday week, O’Brien will be flying the Irish flag in the men’s short track competition.
It is what all those early mornings and long hours are about, as well as the lessons absorbed from his 25th place at the recent European championships, the highest position ever achieved by an Irish skater at a major event.
For six days a week, he arrives at the rink around 5.20am for a 6am start. There’s a twohour skating session before grabbing a bite to eat. Depending on the day, there may be a jog, cycle or a gym session.
He’s back on the ice at six in the evening for two more hours. Such is the life of a short-track speed skater in South Korea. Sunday is his day off.
‘It’s our rest day,’ he grins over Zoom. ‘I have struggled with it [hectic schedule], to be honest. Everyone I am training with has been doing this type of training for a long time, since they were five or six. I’m only getting used to it, but I am slowly getting there. Getting better at it. Still, I always look forward to Sunday. It can’t come around quick enough at this time of the week.’
Since moving to Seongnam three years ago, he’s been the only foreign skater at his training centre.
‘That was tough, at the start,’ the 22-yearold admits. However, his coach Lee Kwang-Soo is a former coach of the US National team and has excellent English. And O’Brien’s Korean is improving. ‘I understand around 80 to 90 per cent of what’s being said around me now,’ he smiles.
One of O’Brien’s regular training partners is Choi Min-jeong, who claimed two gold medals at the 2018 Winter Olympics.
She has been inside the national system since she was five years old, training six days a week, 11 months of the year. Choi’s experience is far from unique. The life may not be glamorous but if O’Brien wants to become a top speed skater, South Korea is the place to be.
The nation has been the undisputed superpower since the event became an official Olympic sport in 1992. And this was done through official government policy. Korean officials and state planners saw this relatively new sport as an opportunity and seized upon it. Speed-skating programmes were started at every existing rink, with hundreds more rinks constructed. Scholarships were offered at high schools and universities. A national sporting infrastructure was created and the country effectively cornered a whole medals market.
‘In Korea, ice rinks are as common as swimming pools or football pitches in other countries,’ O’Brien explains. ‘You have a rink in one spot, and two kilometres down the road, there is another one. Two kilometres from that, there might be another one again. The sport is very big here, it can be hard to get your head around just how big.’ O’Brien grew up in Sydney, where ice rinks are more of a rarity.
He began skating at three years of age, joining his older sister Danielle as she went to the nearby rink, about 15 minutes from their suburban home. Danielle was a talented figure skater and ended up representing Australia at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.
Her younger brother started figure skating but by the time he was six, speed skating had him gripped. ‘I liked figure skating and obviously Danielle was doing
quite well in it, but from the first time I tried speed skating, I knew this was for me. It was just so fast, so thrilling. It was just a lot more exciting.’
Speed skating wasn’t the only sport where a young O’Brien excelled. He was also a decent soccer player and a talented wicketkeeper in cricket. But by his mid-teens, he had given up both to follow his Olympic dream.
‘I went to a sports school, and would have played cricket until I was about 15. A few of the lads that I have played with have gone on to play at state level for New South Wales, which is just below national level. But skating was always there and always a priority.
‘It was getting more and more difficult to do the two. I might have had cricket all day Saturday and had to get up early on Sunday to go short-track training. It was a tough weekend and came to the point where I had to choose one or the other. It was the same reason that I had to stop soccer a couple of years before that, because it was impossible to do the three sports.’
It wasn’t just O’Brien’s dream to become an Olympian, he also wanted to represent Ireland. Both his parents had emigrated to Australia, his father Sean with his family from the west of Ireland when he was only a child. His mother Mary’s connection is much stronger.
She had come to Australia from Kingscourt on a working holiday visa when she was 22. And never left. But Cavan never left her, either, and she has instilled a passion for the county into her children, with regular Christmas trips back home when Liam was growing up.
‘It was great to go back there every year. But it was very cold. My mum grew up on a big farm, and I’d always be out the back, kicking football with my cousins.’
It was a chance meeting between his father and Karen O’Sullivan, the president of the
Ice Skating Association of
Ireland at Skate Down Under in 2013 that opened the door for O’Brien to represent Ireland.
Danielle had been at the event in Sydney where Ciara Peters was the first Irish figure skater to reach the podium in an international event. And O’Sullivan informed Sean that the ISAI, which had just been recognised by Sport Ireland, were hoping to bring speed skating under its umbrella. An opportunity existed.
‘It was something that my mum and dad had always talked about, getting us to represent Ireland. Initially, speed skating wasn’t part of the federation, but when dad ran into Karen in Sydney, she said there were plans to do that. When the opportunity came to represent Ireland, I took it straight away.
‘My parents are so honoured by the fact that I am out there, representing Ireland. Mum has said that she can sleep easily at night now,’ O’Brien says. Unfortunately, because of the pandemic, his parents weren’t able to travel to Poland for the European championships last month or to the Netherlands next week.
‘There is a bubble system in operation, so it can only be myself and my coach going to Holland. It was the same in Poland. We arrive, we get tested and go straight to a hotel to isolate. And then, we just go from the hotel to the rink. It will be weird with nobody in the rink, especially for a world championships. But it was great to skate for Ireland, just happy to get out there and race in a green suit. Hopefully, when the Olympic qualifiers start later this year, my parents will be able to go to an event.’
In the winter of 2014, O’Brien eschewed the annual trip back to Ireland in order to go to South Korea for eight weeks. It was his first time in the sport’s power base, the first step in what he hopes will lead him to the Olympics. ‘Instead of going home to Kingscourt that Christmas, I went to Korea. That was the start of it.
‘The person I trained with there was the 2014 Olympic coach for Korea. I went there for two months and went back for a two-month stint every year until I relocated here full-time three years ago.’
His first visit coincided with a time when the sport in Korea was going through a crisis. At the Sochi Olympics that year, Viktor Ahn (previously Ahn Hyun-Soo) had won three gold medals and a bronze for Russia, having become a Russian citizen in 2011 after falling out with the South Korean federation.
Ahn’s success led to public uproar, with the controversy being debated in the Korean parliament.
However, most of the ire was directed at the federation, rather than Ahn who was – and remains – a national icon in the country.
Without hesitation, O’Brien says that Ahn (below) is his hero and inspiration as a speed skater and suggests that the way he was still able to perform at the top level despite all the controversy over his defection just underlined the type of competitor he was.
‘Viktor Ahn was always the skater I most looked up to. His attitude, the way he skated, the style he did it with. And he was always the most competitive skater, determined to get the most out of himself. Even when he moved to Russia, he did it because he knew he had so much left to achieve and he went on to prove everyone wrong.’
Interestingly, one of O’Brien’s regular training partners now is Ahn Hyun-jun, Ahn’s half-brother. ‘He’s a very talented skater too, just as good as Viktor. It’s great to be able to train with people like that.’
The thing is that short track speed skating is so big in Korea that at almost every training centre, there are athletes good enough to go to the Olympics. And only three will get the nod in any discipline.
‘For every three skaters that are selected to go to the worlds or Olympics for Korea, there are probably another 100 who are just as good, and who could win a medal if they had the chance to go. And someone who wins gold one year could miss out on the team the next. So, when you are in that environment with that huge pool of talent, it is only going to bring you on and improve you as a skater. That’s why Korea has always been the go-to place.’
The Olympic qualifiers will begin in September with four different events. The top-three finishes will count towards the ranking points for qualification. With only 36 places available for 1,500m and 32 each in 500m and 10,00m, it is going to be a tough task for O’Brien to get to Beijing in 2022. But that’s the reason he moved to Korea and it’s why he rises early six days a week. To become a Korean-type short track skater, racing for Ireland.
‘My favourite distance is the 1,500m,’ he explains. ‘I have never really been a sprinter, but I am working on that and hoping to improve that before Olympic qualifiers.
‘All I want to do is skate fast and do the best I possibly can for Ireland.’
MY PARENTS ARE SO HONOURED THAT I WILL REPRESENT IRELAND