Only three athletes have ever represented Team Ireland in both the summer and winter Olympics to date – Terry McHugh, Pat McDonagh and Claire Bergin.
Introducing…. Claire Bergin
CLAIRE Bergin, from Foxrock was a talented sprinter for DSD AC who competed for Ireland in the 2002 World Junior Championships in Jamaica and at European and World Championships plus two World Student Games (2005, 2009).
Frustrated by a succession of set-backs (glandular fever and repetitive injury), she took a complete break from athletics in her final year in DCU but had just returned to the sport when she was approached by Siobhan Hoey in 2008 to try out for the Irish bobsleigh team.
Laois triple-jumpers Siobhan and Aoife Hoey had been trying for a few years to qualify the first Irish women’s sled to an Olympic Games..
Siobhan had moved into coaching the team and recruited Bergin and Carlow multi-eventer Leona Byrne to join her sister Aoife.
Within two weeks of getting her first push on the old bob on wheels kept in Santry Stadium they were having their first runs on ice in Austria and then straight into the European circuit.
“Thankfully Aoife was an excellent driver and Ischgl, where we first started, is known as a very slow track but it was a shock to the system,” recalls Claire who combined bobsleigh and elite athletics for two and a half years.
“The sled is 200kg+ so carrying that, putting it on and off tracks, pushing it and training – I actually got really strong and didn’t suffer from injuries after that.”
She was the brakewoman on Ireland’s only Olympic two-woman bob who qualified for 2010 in dramatic circumstances.
“We were fighting for one of the last of 20 places and did it, in St Moritz, just a few weeks before the Games. Then, when we got there, the Aussies tried to get us kicked out!”
Australia argued that, as the top side in Oceania, they should have got Ireland’s place and appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) during the Games.
They actually got in as a 21st team but not at the expense of Hoey and Bergin who finished 17th with four clean runs, hitting their highest ever speed – 142kph – on the Olympic track.
All of the sliding sports were based in Whistler so the athletes’ village was particularly small and tight-knit and sombre after the death, in practice, of Georgian luge competitor Nodar Kumaritashvili.
“Our previous experience around Europe was very few people at events but at the Olympic track it was full-on with the cowbells and huge crowds at the start and the finish.
“There was a good lot of Irish support there and I’ve discovered that a girl I work with now was living in Vancouver at the time and was in the crowd.”
She quickly returned to work and exams in Deloitte, (who had given her five months off beforehand for training/competition) and is now their Head of Corporate Responsibility.
“Athletics was my passion. I’d dreamed of being a Summer Olympian, as Irish people do, but never imagined I would be a Winter Olympian first.
“It was a brilliant time, competing around Europe in a Hiace van with Aoife driving. We had great fun but trained really hard and did so much work off the track too, lifting, travelling, cleaning the sleds. We were our own mechanics.”
Less than two years later she became Ireland’s only female Summer/Winter Olympian, part of the women’s 4x400m squad in London 2021 though she didn’t get to race.
But she played a central part in Ireland’s qualification as herself, Joanne Cuddihy, Michelle Carey and Marian Heffernan ran a famous Irish record of 3:27.48 at the 2011 World Championships in Daegu to make it.
“That record still stands, we all ran out of our skins that day and never came close to it afterwards. I always knew I wasn’t the best of the best but to contribute to a team, and be part of an Olympic Games, was such a great achievement. To have done it twice in two years is something I’m really proud of.”
Since then Claire has competed internationally in a third sport – tag rugby.
She played in the 2015 and 2018 Tag Rugby World Cups and is still playing for Ireland. She got married in December 2021 and still lives in Dublin.
