College and rowing commitments a delicate balance for Dorney 

No-one else among the carded Irish rowers had to shoulder such an academic weight this season but Jack Dorney has turned the page down on his American chapter for now and through to the Paris Olympics next year.

DUAL AMBITIONS: Jack Dorney, Shandon Boat Club and Rowing Ireland. Pic: Brian Lougheed

Jack Dorney was only a teenager but he was already a wanted man. Midway through his Leaving Cert year, and a hugely promising junior rower in the Irish high-performance system, he had been courted by a slew of America’s elite East Coast Colleges and some of their equivalents out west.

The roll call of suitors was gold-plated: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, California Berkeley, Washington University. There had been trips Stateside to run the rule over these August institutions. He even won the men’s youth singles race at the renowned Head of the Charles regatta in Boston on one.

The school visits spanned no more than 48 hours apiece and it struck him even then the enormity of having to make such a life-altering decision on such little evidence. Harvard was the eventual choice but he tried to counter the magnitude of what he hoped would be his official acceptance by eschewing ‘the big reveal’.

“I logged on and all this confetti came down the screen. I remember it so clearly. I was walking down the stairs and I opened it on my phone because I didn’t want to do this whole build-up thing with my family. Loads of people do that and that would just stress me out. I sat down on the stairs and just thought ‘oh my God’.” 

This wasn’t a scholarship. The fees students pay, at least initially, are premised on their parent’s income. This was a recruitment. A headhunt. It started with Dorney’s selection for the Junior Worlds five years ago and if his performances there prompted the first physical approach from a Harvard scout then the frenzy had long since begun.

Such is the competition for rowing talent in the Ivy League and beyond that young rowers find themselves flooded with messages on their social media accounts from interested third-level parties as soon as the World Junior entries are posted online. It's a recent enough phenomenon so there was no-one to brace him for the approaching tide.

“It can be quite daunting, all these places contacting you.” 

Covid would delay the transatlantic move by 12 months but he is two years into his undergrad studies in biology now and leaning towards a future researching in a genetics field that is leading the way in terms of the scientific leaps being made. There is a sense abounding of new frontiers that are about to be discovered.

“So you can edit genes, gene screening, so now if a woman was to go in and get her baby screened when she is pregnant you won’t just be checking for the ultrasound. You’ll be taking a sample of the tissue and seeing what’s in the genome and seeing what’s going on.

“You can check for countless things, conditions. Like, predicted deficiencies. Things are really stepping on. That field is going to have an AI boom. The biggest thing keeping the bubble from exploding is regulations, which is completely warranted.” 

Every genetics class is supplemented by an ethics equivalent and that volume is symptomatic of an all-encompassing workload that is magnified by his place on the ‘Crimson’ heavyweight rowing squad and his international commitments with Ireland. Ask him how he balances all this and the long pause tells its own story.

He starts college a month late. The World Championships didn’t wrap up last year until the end of September and Harvard’s academic year was a month old by then. That meant a note to every professor requesting a dispensation to enroll in their classes. One refused so he had to reroute to another.

Dorney left Raĉice in the Czech Republic the day after the 2022 Worlds. That was 24 hours earlier than everyone else and he arrived back on campus at 4am the following morning. He was in his first class five hours later. There was an extra month’s work to fit in before Christmas and reminders of the standards expected every morning.

“I leave to go to training at 6am and grab a bit of breakfast in the dining hall on the way and there are people with their laptops open already. Some of them are really built different. You need to be able to stay in your own lane at times because it can be very easy to get distracted with what other people are doing.” 

It’s a life he has embraced with open arms. A choice that has paid off in spades. Dorney lives on campus and his absorption into the culture of the country and the college has been furthered by time spent sharing digs and making friends with some of the Harvard football players. And the ferocious work ethic is hardly new.

An old article on the Rochestown College student council website recounts how he was up at 5.30am on school days, cycled to Shandon Boat Club for an intense 60-minute session, and returned after the final bell for another three hours of training. And he had to sit the American SATs three months before his Leaving.

It says something then that he has found the push and pull between his obligations across the Atlantic to be a stretch. No-one else among the carded Irish rowers had to shoulder such an academic weight this season but he has turned the page down on his American chapter for now and through to the Paris Olympics next year.

Dorney will be in the men’s heavyweight four at the senior World Championships in Serbia early next month. Finish one place better than the boat managed at the 2022 event and they’ll be celebrating an Olympic place. Though still eligible for the U23 grade, he has been there and done that at underage levels and has the medals to show for it.

Harvard has been represented at either the Olympics and Paralympics by 262 athletes, whether students or alumni. Theirs is a roll call and a tradition that goes back to the first modern Games in 1896. It draws in athletes from 21 countries and the tally count stands at 126 medals. Two of those athletes have been Irish. You wouldn’t bet against a third.