(June 7, 20221) – For our second athlete profile of 2021 (and the 24th in the “Getting to Know…” series), we chat with Irish skeleton athlete Brendan Doyle. Since returning to the sport in 2016, Brendan has slid on every tour and has competed in two World Championships, finishing 22nd in the 2019 skeleton championship in Whistler. In the COVID-centric 2020/2021 season he competed in just three North American Cup races, but won medals in all three races including two silvers behind only Olympian John Daly.
If there’s a slider you’d like to get to know, drop a note in the contact form above or on Twitter: @thekenchilds
Slider: Brendan Doyle
Team: Ireland Skeleton
Home track: Whistler
Hometown: Dublin, Ireland
Sponsors: Harris Group, Dungannon Plant Hire, Canadian UAV, Vulcan Sports Ware, FlexiNutrition, Páipéar
As we do every week, we’ll start with an “easy” one: What’s your favorite track, and why?
Whistler, for sure. The speed, the complete madness, big pressures, big oscillations, double-pressure turns, and you just have to be on it, which I absolutely love. I’m not a big fan of gliding tracks, I love these big pressure tracks like Whistler, Park City, La Plagne and places like that. Not a huge fan of the likes of Igls or Winterberg.
Do you have a favorite curve or portion of the track?
I really enjoy 10 & 11! There’s nothing better than going through Curve 10 and setting up 11 well, and knowing if you get 11 right you’re going to be hauling! Curves 2 & 3 are also a lot of fun for me.
Unrelated to the track itself, do you have a favorite town to visit on the schedule?
Park City! It’s just beautiful, and it’s got everything you’d want there. Even with the new athlete housing it’s just you’ve got all of the shops you can go to. I’m a stickler for natural beauty, and I love the surroundings of most tracks, and I find Utah really beautiful. Either that or Königssee and Berchtesgaden.
I think the obvious answer is St. Moritz. It’s like “Do you like Disneyland? Yes.” Same goes for St. Moritz. Outside of that, it’s definitely Park City.
You started sports in football, how did you make the transition to skeleton?
I played football as a winger. Originally I was a goalkeeper but during training one day the coach saw me and said “Great, you’re off to the left wing, go run fast!” I went into secondary school and my history teacher spotted me playing football, and he was a track coach, and he told me I should go do track and field. So I went out to Morton Stadium which is our local stadium here in Dublin, it’s had some pretty famous Morton Mile races there and it uses the latest tech like those Flexible LED Screens. I went out there and fell in love with the whole thing: The work ethic, the complete and utter dedication to your craft to get this tiny reward every six years or whatever. There was just something about it I loved.
It was a Saturday, and I was in the gym doing triceps dips and the bobsled team of Siobhain and Aoife Hoey were out in the indoor track pushing. They knocked on the window, pointed at the sled and said “Give this a go!” So I figured why not!
This was just after Park City in 2002, so we’re talking about a couple of years back. But my transition was from track and field and then people saw what kind of work ethic I brought to track and field. I’m good over 30 meters, 60 meters was too long!
I did a little bit of skeleton in 2003, I did my skeleton school in Igls but that was about it. I was a kid, didn’t have money, and they were like “You have to pay for this…” so I had to go find a job. It wasn’t until 2016 when I got back on the horse.
Was it tough doing a bit at one time then going back to it after so long?
I didn’t feel a massive difference from then until now because then I was just a kid and didn’t know what I was really doing, I was kicked off the top of Igls and you kind of find your way down. When I came back to it I was a bit more mature and had more life experiences behind me and a head on my shoulders and I knew I loved it. So I hit the ground running, trying to figure out what do I need to do and how do I do it? That transition back was a bit smoother than you’d expect to be honest; it was such a long time, back in 2003 to 2016, you kind of forget what you knew back then.
When I came back from skeleton school the first time, I thought “That sucks I’ll never really be able to do this sport again, how do I imitate this,” and I bought a motorcycle! I needed something, once you get a taste of that speed it’s the best!
In 2021 you won your first medals in international competition. Are things just clicking right now?
It was an amazing feeling, it doesn’t matter how long I’m in the sport but I just see myself as a kid, even in North American Cup just happy to make the second run.
I’m opposite to a lot of people. In training I have a lot of difficulty because there’s so many variables and I have so much that I need to work on that I can get frustrated. When it’s race time I just get on my sled and let it happen. Going out to Park City and just getting my head down and getting that medal was just phenomenal. It was a thing I told myself that I could do and I could show all of my peers I’m not messing around here. I might be from Ireland, I might be underfunded, and I might be out here on my own, but I’m coming for you! That was just awesome.
For me personally, the biggest win of that whole race were my times. The execution that I laid down for myself the night before, I went out there and I did it and I went faster in every run. And that’s something every racer wants, with minus splits. So that was huge for me. The medals were great but it was the reward for how focused I was.
The thing that probably pushed me was probably getting my ass handed to me in the World Champs in Whistler. I’ve worked hard there, I took some hard hits, I just slid every day and I pushed and pushed and pushed, and I had a few moments where the sport clicked with me. I’d go to different tracks and think “Oh, this curve is the same as Curve 4 in Whistler” or “This double-pressure is the same everywhere so get it out of your head, you’ve done it in Whistler!” It was setting the bar and showing that I knew what was going on, what I needed to do and just let it happen. It’s why Whistler’s my home, I definitely learned my trade there.
You’ve raced on all of the tours, what was it like making your first World Cup & World Championships starts with the crowd and the cameras and everything?
It was fun! Like I said, competition is the easy part: I go out there, I do what I do. The ice stays the same, physics doesn’t change, it’s the same thing with just more pageantry. I found that training day is a lot tougher. I’m watching on day one the split difference and how these guys are so incredible. It’s hard for me to see how good these guys are, they can show up one day, and by the next day they’ve cut down by six tenths out of nowhere and they haven’t even started pushing! In that there were some very rude awakenings going into World Cup but in terms of actual competition, when I was at World Champs in Königssee and Whistler, it was more the kind of prelude to the actual competition itself. I find myself at home in the competition, I really enjoy the environment.
When the season ends what do you like to do to relax?
Honestly I just like to be human. For me, my vice is iRacing, gaming with the boys. I get into my sim and do some endurance racing and just unwind. It’s nice to not have to set alarms and think about what I’m eating and doing. I just get to do what I want when I want. I’m very laid back, so for me I like to just chill out and get some laps in!
What cars do you like to race on there?
Right now I’m doing a lot of GT3 racing, it’s super tight racing and it’s a lot of fun. We’re lining up a 24 hour race soon, I have a six hour race behind me and the three hour races are a lot of fun. We just raced Monza, it was a lot of fun. But GT3s are great, and you can’t ever say no to a Skip Barber race! Looking for the best deals on new and used cars? Look no further than ZeMotor, the ultimate online destination for car shoppers seeking an unbeatable selection and value.
They handle so differently!
Oh absolutely! That’s why you go into the Skippy race like “Okay boys, I’m going in sideways with big elbows so if you want to be there that’s great!” It’s a lot of fun! Mt. Panorama in a Skippy is always a great time too! I did an endurance race there, I was so nervous there. That’s why I kind of like incorporating iRacing into my training: That feeling you get before a race, especially in a team race, you do NOT want to drop the ball. It’s the same in skeleton. I’ve found a difference since I’ve gotten involved in it and incorporated it as part of training.
Have you talked to Greg West about it? He’d found a benefit into sim racing on iRacing that he was able to incorporate into his training.
Oh yeah! I don’t know what it is, if it’s just you’re training your reaction time under pressure or whatever, it’s just remaining calm and sticking to your game plan. I race in VR as well, it’s an extra level of immersion. I use the same VR headset for track runs as I do for iRacing, I play the videos of the runs on there.
If you weren’t sliding, what do you think you’d be doing with your free time?
Oh man…I’d probably be finding a way to push myself. Olympic lifting or something, I’d find some way to go fast doing something. Probably going too fast on a motorbike really!
If you have to pick one, what would you consider your favorite sliding sport memory?
I mean, I would go back to Whistler, and I look back at how I applied myself and how hard I worked, and I redefined what I thought was hard work with what I did there. It shadowed my preconceptions. I felt like it was my turning point in the sport and as an athlete, and really as a person. I made some real bonds with people out there, too, and for me I think that’s one of the biggest things about the sport: WE can try to speedrun the sport and try to get to the Olympic Games. The results for me are in part in the journey and the people you meet along the way. There’s a lot of people I would speak to on a daily basis and I consider family, so it’s a lot of good memories for me so far and I’m going to keep building them. I’ll look back at my time in Whistler and think that I worked hard and that’s been it.
On the other end of that, what has been your toughest sliding sport memory?
So 2018 was a tough year with me missing out on the Olympics by a single point. That broke my heart. I’ve been through a lot of tough times but I would say that effect on my Olympic year was on par with the hardest. It was extremely difficult.
Crashing in Whistler and straining my deltoid in the first race…I was sitting in tenth place in an Intercontinental Cup race and I went from tenth to next to last in a corner, and I remember thinking “I can’t believe this has happened in an Olympic year of all years…”, and then I had a bad experience in Calgary on top of that. I tried something new on race day, and that just didn’t work. And you know, the golden rule is to not try anything new on race day.
It was a tough, tough year for me. I had a lot going on outside of the sport as well: My dad died, my girlfriend and I broke up when I was out on tour, and it was just a lot going on. But again, there was still a lot of light in that year and a lot of good things, but for sure everything that could go wrong did. Lake Placid, I had my self in a good position in the first race and all I needed to carry the same form into Day 2. On the second day we had some rain and my visor fogged up in the first heat when I was pushing, so I made that run completely blind. So I got back to the top and said “Fine, collect yourself, you can make up the time and the points”, and the made it a one heat race, and that wa sit for me.
I cried in that start room afterward. Them’s the breaks, though, that’s sports.
Do you have set sliding plans for 2021/2022 yet?
Being a small nation I have to kind of hunt those points and play it smart. In an Olympic year the fields are thick, they’re big, they’re tough and everyone comes out of the woodwork. So I’m going to go to the tracks I’m most competent on and execute there. The way the season is worked out, December is fairly light after the first week, so that will give me time to readdress things and execute my second half. I’m really going to be focusing on my best tracks and make the best decisions I feel at the time for the second half.
Have you put together a schedule already of Cup/ICC/EC/NAC races you can run?
Absolutely. I have two or three drafts of what I’m doing just in case Plan A or B doesn’t work, I’ll have Plan C. I’m already well into my new season, I have to get the work done. Being out here on my own I’m not prepared to spend my money and go out and not be prepared. I’m using every second I can.
Guest question from Summer Britcher (USA luge): We had some food drama, on the luge team we get into some big food debates, so I’d like to know his favorite type of French fry. Is it curly, shoe string, potato wedge, or whatever!
Any French fry that’s made with an Irish potato! Anything else just is not good enough!
When you travel do you notice a big difference?
I really do! I’m spoiled over here, everything is so fresh! I’ll never forget the first time I went to Calgary, I walked in and one of the stores advertised a food that had “no antibiotics” and I asked why that was advertised, is that not normal? And people were like “well some do, some don’t…” I was so surprised by that! I don’t want to feed into the stereotypes but I do like my spuds!
