Ignored pioneer heads for the hills

Turn your coffee table upside down. Break off the legs and smooth the rough edges. Take the wooden slab to the Cresta Run in St Moritz, Switzerland and launch yourself down the 1,500 metres of ice, head first, belly down. Your feet are the brakes, your head the rudder. It will take about 60 seconds and you'll hit 90 miles per hour. You are now a Skeleton slider and next year in Salt Lake City you will be able to compete for the first Olympic medal available to the sport.

Clifton Wrottesley (33) is such a wanton slider. He's a head-first man. He's been doing it all over the world. Now he's doing it for Ireland and despite spectacular indifference from the Irish Sports Council, he is likely to find himself in Mormon city, Utah next year.

From an Irish perspective the Salt Lake City Olympics is a four-yearly peek at a different sporting culture. A look at life in the freezer, bad fashion and the occasional wipe-out.

It wasn't so long ago that Olympic javelin thrower Terry McHugh was urging photographers to come out to a Dunnes Stores car park to watch him push a shopping trolley across the tarmacadam. Novel idea, good pic.

This is how we simulate the start, he told us. We didn't fully understand, but there was a grudging respect for the hulking bobsleigh pioneer. McHugh burned with a passion. Wrottesley has the same idealistic vision but in the Skeleton he is getting in at the start, not chasing the tails of the established icy nation giants.

"This is the first Olympics in which the Skeleton is a recognised sport. Along with women's bobsleigh being new, we could actually be in the forefront of these sports right now. The opportunity is there to seize the sport," says Wrottesley.

Struggling on his own money, some funding from the Olympic Council of Ireland and sponsorship from a Bordeaux vineyard, Chateaux de Sours, the Dublin-born slider is nothing if not resourcefully imaginative . But his gear is still an expanse of unbroken whiteness, sponsor friendly, but largely logo-free territory.

The Irish Winter Olympic team have been raised on a diet of limited enthusiasm and it has kept them slim, but the Sports Council's refusal to recognise them as a sport worthy of state funding grates.

"Take the Swiss," says McHugh. "They wouldn't even have the number of participants in an event like the bobsleigh that the Sports Council say you need to have to be recognised. The Sports Council say 1,500 active members. In Switzerland, where it is one of the national sports, you'd have 400 maximum.

"We could sign up kids from all around the country for 10p and come up with the numbers but that would make a farce of the thing. The criteria for recognition are misplaced."

Wrottesley, a fund manager based in London, has not overlooked the irony of Ireland's feisty challenge. The Salt Lake games will be the most expensive in the history of the Olympics because of the additional security measures required since the events of September 11th.

NBC, having spent $3.5 billion for US rights to televise the Olympic Games between 2000 and 2008, coughed up $545 million for Salt Lake city alone. Already 92 per cent of the advertising has been taken up.

Ireland will probably be the poorest team of the 20 nations that qualify.

"Absolutely, we're up against it," Wrottesley says. "But that can also work in our favour. The Skeleton is such an unusual thing that people are immediately going to be drawn into it. That's what we are going to have to try and work. It is a bizarre sport and in that respect it sells well.

"Okay, it's marginal. But by its very nature it's aspirational. It will never have the broad-base following like skiing, which is recreational. But you won't get a mass of people involved in an aspirational sport. We're being discriminated against because we are small and unknown, not because we are any less worthy."

Undoubtedly true, but the question is: would anyone really froth at the mouth because of it and would the nation care more to watch a dull football match in Iran than see an Irishman flash into a medal position in the Winter Olympics? But such comparisons are also misplaced.

"I have a dream," says Wrottesley. "You, know . . . I have a dream."

That, at least, is an honourable starting point.