Ever since he got the idea into his head about going to Sochi and competing in the skeleton, Sean Greenwood has had a number circled in the calendar. Nothing exists beyond it, everything before it is aimed at it.
Come yesterday though, everything was done and ready. He couldn’t do another training run because the women’s competition was up and running. He did a bit of a workout just to prime the muscles and spent a couple of hours prepping the blades of his sled. But otherwise, time limped uphill and all he could do was watch it go by.
“I got a nice sleep in, that’s one thing I’ve been able to do today,” he says. “The days have been all over the place here – some mornings we’ve had a 5.30 start, some mornings nine o’clock. Training has been staggered, different every day. Today I got to sleep in until 10am.
“What to do after this race, I don’t have sorted out at all. I really have no idea. I don’t know where I’m going to go, what I’m going to do, nothing.
"Basically everything has been put on hold just for these two days. It's going to be an all-out fight for every inch over both days. So I'm here, killing time, thinking about anything else apart from skeleton as much as possible. The whole idea is to remove it from the front of my brain and then see where it takes me."
Nothing obvious
Like each of the Irish competitors in Sochi, there's nothing obvious about Greenwood's route to the starting gate this afternoon (12.30pm start, Irish time). His mother Sibéal Foyle left Newcastle, Co Galway, in the early 1980s for Canada where she became, among other things, an artist, an author and a university professor.
The lack of a strict nine-to-five tether meant when Seán was a child, she was able to bring him to Galway for months at a time. He’d never have outgrown his heritage even if he’d wanted to.
When he grew up and finished high school, he jumped on a plane to Dublin. He lived in Kilmainham for six months in 2005, waited tables in Café Bar Deli on Grafton St, applied for and got his Irish passport. When he went back home he lived with his dad in Calgary, 10 minutes from the site of the 1988 games.
Watching TV one day in 2008, he saw something called the skeleton and thought he’d try it. By the time Vancouver came around two years later, he’d long been hooked by the sport.
He volunteered at the sliding track, watching the best skeleton riders in the world whizzing by while politely but distractedly showing people to their seats. Four years on, look what's happened.
Training times
His training times this week suggest a finish of somewhere between 18th and 21st place. Skeleton takes place over two days, with the average time of your first three runs deciding whether you progress to take a fourth. Twenty riders will make it, seven won't.
His aim is not to be among those seven. What happens when it’s all over, he can’t even begin to guess: “I don’t know – probably unemployed! My plan is to basically enjoy this as much as I can. We’ll be here for a week or 10 days after my event is over so I will enjoy that. And then I intend to run away for a period of time. I don’t know where or for how long but I’m going to head off and let myself be normal again.
“I’ll come back with a plan after that, I guess. I don’t know what it is yet. It all depends on a few things. If I can get sponsorship to keep going, for one. Whether I think I can do better next time around, for another. So I’ll see where I am. I kind of need these results to help me figure it out. I’ll tell you in a couple of days, really.
"I only got on to the World Cup circuit last year so I haven't really had long enough to get any momentum going to be able to get sponsors interested.
“I tried pretty hard at the start of this year to get some going but it’s chicken and egg. You need World Cup positions to get funding but you need funding to get World Cup positions. This year, because of how far away Sochi is and where I’ve been training, I’d say I’ve spent upwards of 40 grand or so.”
