Joyce on the piste in Japan

He pulls out his helmet from the duffle bag and holds it up in the thin wintery light. In these global times of the televised, frontier-free, sports village, it is, in its nakedness, an object of ridicule, an aberration, a failed entity.

It is lightweight and black as a marble tombstone, an egg shell. It is, frighteningly, endorsement free, name-free, company-free and logo-free.

Its only task is very narrowly defined - to protect the head and the life of its owner. Clearly of limited use. Peter Schwarzacher-Joyce eyes his helmet and sees prairies of space crying out to be covered with sticky backed labels. His head for the moment is safe. Issues such as air fare and food occupy his mind.

Joyce on the piste is as much an object of curiosity as the sponsorfree zone on his head. Along with Dubliner Colm Coulmb he hopes to become the first Irish skier to represent Ireland in the winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan next year. They join a curious band of fellow travellers like the Kenyan cross country skier and the Virgin Islands' downhiller as rare gate crashers into the sub culture of high mountains and low temperatures. The Irish climate's antipathy to snow and it's geographical inability to quarry mountains any higher than those that can be conquered with a sturdy pair of boots and two Mars Bars, make Joyce and Coulmb unique even by international standards. The two, however, have achieved the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) qualifying standards for Nagano and hope to hear within the next few weeks whether or not they have been accepted for the 1998 games.

Joyce, unlike Coulmb, has grown up in the Alps, having been born in St Anton, Austria to a Dublin mother and Austrian father. His life has been spent on real snow while Coulmb's experience has largely come from years of perfecting the synthetic run at Kilternan in south Dublin.

"All my family ski. My younger sister Rosanna, who has started college in Maynooth this year, my older sister Caroline and my father, who used to be a ski instructor in the States. From the age of seven my parents let me do my own thing. I skied all over the mountains around St Anton. Even my friends were not allowed to do that," says Joyce of his unbridled youth.

The Saltzburg University student has already competed for Ireland at the World Championships and last year in Sestriere, Italy came 39th in the downhill from 69 starters and 39th in the giant slalom from 110 starters. Without any serious training he has managed to jump several hundred rankings in one season, from 1,400 down to 600 and this year will take part in the World Cup Series - the Grand Prix circuit of skiing - which starts in November in Canada.

"This year it should be possible to go down to 400 or 300, somewhere around that and then equipment really starts to become important," he says. Joyce has already raced the most dangerous and fastest slopes in the world. Last year he threw himself into a run at Kitzbuhel where there was no snow, just a frosted pane of glass on the side of the mountain.

"They say if you ski Kitzbuhel it's like jumping out of a plane with no parachute. After Kitzbuhel, there is nothing else. We were fore runners to the race. Our job was to basically go down the run and check out that everything was alright for the competition. It's pure ice, pure seethrough ice and it starts off at 75 per cent steepness. There were 60,000 people watching. The competitors reached speeds of 154kph and the longest jump on the run, which lasts for two minutes, was 92 metres. The fastest bit was at the very end, so as you begin to get tired you meet this part of the course. I was there for a week last year and I lost five kilos. My body was just going crazy."

Although Joyce has already competed against the best in the world, an Olympic medal in the winter games is still considered the ultimate sports accessory. There are very few no shows at the Olympics. Although the adjustment by Coulmb from the prickly plastic of the man-made Dublin run to that of an Olympic course will be greater than that of Joyce, both will need to find different gears and be able to adjust to whatever conditions pertain.

The snow in Nagano is different to the snow in Europe and the snow in Canada is different again. Then the higher the run, the harder the snow and again conditions vary considerably. Japan is, according to Joyce, considered less reliable than most other international venues for consistent weather. But it is in other areas that the International Ski Federation (FIS) officials have already encountered un-reliability and their efforts to stop next year's games staging one of the shortest Alpine downhill runs in recent history looks doomed.

High, hard snow looks out of the question in Nagano. Hopes of raising the start of the showpiece downhill race from 1,680 metres to 1,800 metres has been turned down on environmental grounds.

If the run were constructed any higher it would transgress laws relating to building in a national park. Bernhard Russi, the FIS technical director and designer of the course, has said that a racing time of one minute 30 seconds is too short to test a skier's stamina and that raising the start would add another 15 seconds to the time, making it the same as the last few Olympics. Already the biathlon course has had to be relocated because nesting goshawks were found in the area.

As a student of sport and ecology Joyce will no doubt side with the birds but the odds are against him in Japan just as they are in the World Cup Series. As competitors race they leave ruts in the snow from consistently taking the best lines. The lower ranked skiers are put at the tail end and invariably have to negotiate the track marks left by the earlier runs.

"If you are racing . . . and this sounds ridiculous . . . everyone actually prefers ice because then everyone has the same chance of doing well. If you have soft snow and you are number 20 or 30 you're going to get ruts. With ice that does not happen.

"At that level equipment also makes a difference and the best skiers also have a team of top service men with them," says Joyce.

Millionare, playboy and wicked skier Alberto Tomba, would have as many as 20 pairs of skis, each designed for different conditions. Minutes before a race he would procrastinate like a debutante trying to chose a pair of shoes for her debs. Picking the wrong ski could mean 20th rather than first place.

Joyce has two pairs, one for practice runs and the other for competition. "It's great to ski for Ireland. Although I was brought up outside the country, we all hold Irish passports and come over very often. I am not taking anyone else's place.

"I believe I could get a ranking in the top 20 or 30 in the World Cup series. I think I dare to do things and that helps. I am not afraid of jumping. I've being doing it all of my life."

Turned down by the Irish Sports Council for money because skiing is not a sport that could possibly take root in a snow-free zone like Ireland, Joyce and Coulmb hope that their Irishness will be an attraction rather than a hindrance. Media interest revolves around that which is different, and that is what he has been telling his potential sponsors.

The shiny black helmet is tucked away and Joyce skips up the road, resourceful and largely unperturbed by John Treacy's kindly let down. He knows that he will ski in the Olympics, if accepted, and in the World Cup Series regardless of sponsors or government inertia.

But maybe he should have been told about Ireland's 50 metre pools, its boxing clubs, its soccer stadiums, its . . . maybe it should have been broken to him gently. When he is successful, we provide the bus ride from the airport. Slammers all round.