Meet Elsa Desmond - Ireland's luge star who refused to give up on Olympic dream

Irish Daily Mirror

a day ago

Very few people would go to the extreme of setting up a national sports federation to pursue their Olympic dream.
That's exactly what Elsa Desmond did when she was 19, setting up the Irish Luge Federation after a long and then intensive period of lobbying the Olympic Federation of Ireland.
From there it took almost two years for her to be allowed to race internationally. Her big ambition was to qualify for the Olympic Winter Games in Milan-Cortina next February yet she squeezed into the 2022 Games in Beijing. "I'd had this sort of 48 hours of being utterly miserable because we thought I wasn't in," she explained.
Desmond was travelling in a minibus from Sigulda in Latvia to Oberhof in Germany, a two-day journey of the kind that the smaller competing nations take as a matter of course on the circuit, when Ireland's chef de mission Nancy Chillingworth phoned her.
"She said, 'I'd normally ring your coach but since you don't have one, I'll tell you, you've qualified for the Olympics'," Desmond recalled. "I may have made her say it three or four times because I just didn't believe her. I really didn't think that that was possible. Then I remember her hanging up and I just cried for about 10 minutes before I was even able to call my mom."
Desmond has always lived a life less ordinary. She was raised in a family surrounded by Olympic rowers in Buckingham. Her father had competed internationally and her mother was an elite swimmer.
"I didn't think being an Olympic gold medallist was that big a deal until I got older because so many of them were my family and friends, it's just something I grew up around," she said.
Desmond fell in love with luge while watching the 2006 Torino Olympics. "I knew from then that it was what I wanted to do," said the 27-year-old, who qualifies for Ireland through her grandparents from Cork and Cavan.
"Then I got on the sled as a teenager and there was no going back. My life has never been the easy path, so this just made sense."
Luge riders speed down a slippery ice track, relying on reflexes for steering - and with no protection. "The danger wasn't really something I considered," Desmond reflected. "I always just thought Luge was this beautiful sport because it's a mix of power and precision.
"Unlike bobsleigh and skeleton, where you can hit a wall and still win an Olympic medal, you can't do that in Luge. It requires perfect, and I always thought there was beauty in that."
But there are no luge tracks in Britain and Ireland and so the first time Desmond got on a track was after extensive requests to accompany the British military to Innsbruck in Austria.
"It was all these adult men and me, this teenage girl, and I was faster than all of them. And I just fell in love with it from that first run," she said.
And if it had gone badly? "Knowing myself, I think I would have persevered for a while, to be sure that I was terrible at it," Desmond smiled. "But it's one of those sports you need a natural ability to start with. I've seen so many people who are naturally athletic, but you put them on a sled and they're useless.
"You'd never know which way it's going to go with luge. But we started with me from a very low start height, I only did sort of five or six corners on that first run.
"My speeds weren't very high but I didn't crash particularly more than anyone else that week. I think they thought I was a pain in the ass. Like I've been trying to get on that camp for years and I think they finally thought, 'right, let her have a go and then she'll leave us alone'. And that unfortunately didn't happen!"
Still on the board of the Irish Luge Federation and also coaching Lily Cooke and Finnian Zimmerman, who are up and coming athletes, Desmond is also an emergency medicine doctor.
She left behind the stress of life in the NHS system for a job in Akureyri, in northern Iceland, where she works half the hours for double the pay and that allows her to focus on her training.
Now ranked 28th in the world - she was 54th going to Beijing and finished in 33rd place - Desmond makes her life as a luge athlete work despite the obstacles in terms of funding and resources.
In Beijing she used a junior beginner sled and now, in the process of sourcing a new senior standard racing sled, she is looking at a €20,000 price tag. "I might have to sell my car in autumn to be able to afford this new equipment and if I have to do that, I have to do that, it'll be worth it," she said.
That the next Games will be in Italy, where this journey began for her, is what everything is building towards for Desmond. "Italy would be huge, partly because I was inspired by an Olympics in Italy," she said.
"I watched the women's event, and there were no Irish women. There were also no British women, so there was no one there that I felt represented me. So I decided I would do it.
"And now the idea that there might be an Irish child the same age I was watching and seeing me would be really a dream come true."