Irish skier Cormac Comerford 'speechless' after special World Championship performance
Cormac Comerford: Finished in 23rd spot in Alpine Skiing World Championship slalom.
The sacrifices are beginning to pay off for Cormac Comerford with his 23rd place finish in Sunday’s Alpine Skiing World Championship slalom being Ireland’s best performance on the stage since 1999.
A superb second run in Cortina d’Ampezzo saw him rise 17 places on a challenging course that laid waste to many of the 55-strong finalists, his combined time of 2:00.04 enough for a coveted top 25 spot, the country’s first since Patrick Paul Schwarzacher Joyce came 22nd in Vail.
“I’m a bit speechless,” he said in the wake of the performance. “I’ve said it to myself multiple times that top 30 in the world championships is the goal but this was special.”
Indeed, up to that stage, it had been a frustrating championships for the Glenageary man, straddling fences in two separate qualifying rounds.
“For that first run, I was lacking confidence and had a bit of a mental block. It was not an amazing performance but was enough to secure a solid place.
“The second one was the special one because it was a really challenging course; it caught a lot of people out and a lot didn’t make it to the end. I was on my game and in the flow having found my feet and shot up the rankings. It was a bit of a shock but just making it down was a big feat.”
His weekend is a far cry from four years when he slept in St Moritz train station and lugged his heavy gear a couple of kilometres in a bid to save money when competing in the 2017 edition.
But his 49th place finish that year vindicated his decision to commit everything he could to his passion and the 24-year-old Dubliner is now feeling a level of vindication.
“After the World Championships in St Moritz, in 2017, I just remember being hungry, like, starving. Towards the end of school, I was about 18 and there were no funds left. I was scraping the bottom of the bucket. I had struggled for a long time to keep my career alive. So that World Championships represented everything I’ve worked for to be able to continue skiing because, before that, I was on the brink of giving up.”
His rise to competitiveness is all the more remarkable given his formative years were almost exclusively on the dry slopes in Kilternan and in the UK.
His family never went on a ski holiday, his father has still never donned a set of skis, making him a step removed from the staple perception of Irish snow sports athletes raised in the mountains and qualifying to wave the tricolour via parentage rules.
But Comerford is starting to feel a shift in support for “homegrown” athletes to pursue the top level. He has availed of a sports scholarship at TU Dublin and, more recently, FBD’s Dare to Believe programme.
“There has been a revolution for Snow Sports in Ireland since the new Olympic Federation of Ireland has come in.
“They’ve really put an emphasis on having equal opportunities for athletes across all sports.
“Even though it’s not a big sport [in Ireland], we have athletes that are pushing just as hard to reach high levels as in any other sport. They highlighted the importance of that and it’s put snow sports in a fresh new light.
“People appreciate that we bring the same value, overcoming challenges and obstacles and learning from them.”
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