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.