8 hours ago
Two into one won't go but Liam O'Brien eyeing 2026 Winter Olympics spot
Australia may be one of the world's sporting strongholds but, similarly to Ireland, it wouldn't fall under the category of winter powerhouse (although their 19 medals are not to be sniffed at!).
And yet next February, a Sydney-born short track speed skater is hoping to represent Team Ireland at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano-Cortina - and if he were to qualify, he wouldn't be the first member of his family to compete at a Winter Games.
The athlete in question is Liam O'Brien, whose connections to this island flow through both sides of his family, with his mother hailing from Kingscourt, Co. Cavan before she relocated Down Under in her 20s on a working holiday visa and met his father whose roots are in Meath and Leitrim respectively.
As a child growing up in sports-mad and outdoorsy Australia, a young O'Brien dabbled with playing GAA in the Michael Cusacks club in Sydney. But in those days it was soccer and especially cricket that took precedence.
"I played a lot of cricket and my pop wanted to get me into hurling but just didn't happen," the 26-year-old says at the Sport Ireland Campus during a recent visit as the road towards next year's Olympics ramps up.
A love for cricket makes perfect sense from an Aussie perspective but how in the world did skating slip into his bloodstream?
That's where the influence of his sister Danielle, who is eight-and-a-half years his senior, comes into the picture.
"She went to a birthday party at an ice rink and just loved skating and kept hassling mum wanting to go back," O'Brien explains.
"She went into ice dance and when I was born, I was just born into an ice rink, so I started skating at the age of three - figure skating - and then slowly moved into speed skating."
Ice dance wasn't a mere hobby for Danielle and in 2014, she represented Australia at that year's Winter Olympics in Sochi. The entire family travelled to southern Russia to support her and the experience opened doors in her younger brother's imagination.
"After watching her compete at the Olympics, it really drove me to want to become an Olympic athlete as well," he explains.
"It was only after that that I'd seen really the goal and that target there in short track speed skating and really went for it then. That's when I gave up cricket and soccer as well."
Unlike his sister, O'Brien is representing Ireland and that came following a chance meeting between his father and Ice Skating Association of Ireland chief executive Karen O'Sullivan in 2012.
"We've kept contact ever since and when the opportunity came up to switch across to Ireland, I took that chance and Danielle and Mum and Dad were all very supportive and well, they loved it."
Turbo-charging his pursuit of getting to the highest level in short track speed skating also meant moving away from Australia, with the aim of trying to qualify for Beijing 2022.
Which is how he ended up relocating to Seongnam, South Korea in 2019 and enrolling at Dankook University.
The country has produced the most Olympic gold medalists in short track ahead of China and Canada, making it a natural hub for anyone wanting to hone their craft.
But his time there coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic and the restrictions that came with it, although apart from the difficulty of obtaining masks, he enjoyed the experience and the tougher challenge was learning Korean.
"When Covid hit, there were no visas and so my only way to secure a visa was through study and I decided to learn Korean," O'Brien recalls.
"That course was taught purely in Korean, and I hadn't actually learned the language up until that stage and I was given 24 hours before I had to do my first exam. I knew how to sound things out, but I didn't know how to write them, so I spent 24 hours learning the alphabet and how to put them all together because it's different symbols where it forms one character. So that was an interesting afternoon."
O'Brien quickly became fluent, however the dream of representing Ireland in Beijing would be dashed when he tore his anterior cruciate ligament nine weeks before the qualifiers and although he got back on the ice far quicker than anticipated he would miss the Olympics by the narrowest of margins.
"That was a big setback there," he admits.
"I tried to keep myself entertained and not think about it at first. I was given 12 weeks of no sport whatsoever, no walking, nothing.
"However, I was back on the ice within four weeks. And that was after being in a brace with my knee and not able to walk. And I was unlucky. I missed out by one spot in the end. So there were 36 qualified for the 1500m and we placed 37th."
Fast forward to the present and O'Brien is still dreaming of a Games and to further that goal he has followed his Korean coach across to the Chinese city of Tianjin, just outside Beijing, in the last few weeks. "Bit of a move," he jokes.
"The coach there is a Korean coach, Kwang-Soo Lee," he adds, "He's coached many junior athletes up into elite athletes there and into the national team. So I followed him across and I was with him before the Beijing Olympics as well. And actually, before I hurt my knee there he had just gone off to China that time."
While O'Brien feels he is tracking well towards qualification for Milano-Cortina, two into one doesn't go. That's because Ireland will only have one quota spot in short track speed skating at the Games and Canadian-born Sean McAnuff, who was also in attendance at the Sport Ireland Campus late last month, is also vying for that single spot.
"The first time I met Sean was probably when I was actually representing Australia," says O'Brien.
"He was there at the 2018 Winter Olympics, the qualifications, and I was representing Australia at that time and we met there and since then now skating together for Ireland.
"Sean is based out of Hungary and unfortunately, we don't get to train together, but it's hard as well when you don't have a relay team, you don't have that same, I guess, companionship."
And even though they do not favour the same distances - O'Brien is more into the 1500m whereas McAnuff leans more towards the 500m and 1500m - it will still come down to one spot for Ireland if either meet the qualification criteria.
"We're both different distances. He likes the shorter distances, where I prefer the longer distances, which makes it hard, where if we both qualify in our respective distance, there's still only the one spot, so it makes it hard in that sense however."
The final qualification staging points will come in October and November but given how intrepid O'Brien has been in his short track pursuit to date, no one will be counting him out of being at the start line in Italy next February.
