Winter Tale: Wilf O'Reilly

The speed skater went to the Winter Olympic Games in Calgary in 1988 where short track was making its debut as a demonstration sport.

A fall in the 1500m was anything but the perfect start in Canada, with O’Reilly so fed up that he planned to chuck it all in and head home.

But then an unlikely trip to the laundry room convinced him to change his mind, thankfully so as he went onto win gold in both the 500m and 1000m.

He recalls: “The 1500m wasn’t really my best event so falling wasn’t a disaster. But I remember saying after the race, that I was going to quit.

“I told the coach that he could withdraw me from the other competitions. That evening I went and washed my clothes, didn’t go to bed and just watched the washing machine going round and round and round. Then all of a sudden I saw this gold medal right in the middle of the washing machine.

“About four o’clock in the morning, I was sat on my own and I turned around and Archie Marshall, the head coach was there.

“I asked: ‘What are you doing here?’ and he said: ‘What are you doing here? It’s four in the morning. Are you racing tomorrow?’. And I said: ‘Yes, I’m racing tomorrow and I’m going to win Olympic gold’. That’s how it all started.

“You’d talk about it being a fairytale come true, but it wasn’t a fairytale, it was a case of déjà-vu.

“I was in incredible form. Two years prior to the Games I’d lived in Canada for a year, training with the Canadians. I’d always had the ability but it all came together on the day and I completely dominated the 500m.”

The Calgary Games are probably best remembered for two entries who did not win medals but captured the imagination. The Jamaican bobsleigh team was immortalised in the film ‘Cool Runnings’, while from a British perspective, it was in Calgary that Eddie the Eagle became the first Brit to compete in ski jumping at the Olympics in 60 years.

While officially, Team GB came away from those Games without a medal, there was never a moment where O’Reilly felt like he was not part of the team.

That was particularly the case when it came to the medal ceremony, with the introduction of an Olympic Plaza where 100,000 people would show up to celebrate sporting success.

O’Reilly remembers: “It was the first time the concept of an Olympic Plaza was introduced. You won your medal and rushed off in a car to the Plaza where all the sports would collect their medals.

“There was a Finnish ski jumper, Matti Nykanen, who got his medal, then I got mine, and then it was Alberto Tomba who received his after me.

“So even though it was a demonstration sport, I got the chance to receive my medal in front of 100,000 people and with the national anthem and all the TV broadcasters there. So you were treated very much the same. It was a dream come true.”

Collecting his Olympic gold medal before the legendary Italian skier ‘Tomba La Bomba’ was a far cry from O’Reilly’s early days of inline skating across Birmingham.

From holding himself up in the hallway as he learned to support himself, it quickly became a form of freedom. A free mode of transport that allowed him to zoom around the city in the summer holidays.

While Team GB became a force in figure skating, as John Curry, Robin Cousins and then Torvill and Dean won golds in consecutive Olympics from 1976 to 1984, O’Reilly was more taken by the rough and tumble of short track.

And it was something that just clicked for him.

He explained: “You start doing something and are quite naturally very good at it. I was fairly good at sports generally. I had this skill. It’s very much like somebody starting to do mathematics. If you can work it out and remember, it all seems to fall into place without an awful lot of work, in terms of balance, technique, the skill of left-right, coordination and that stuff.”

After his success in Calgary, O’Reilly kicked on, becoming world champion in 1991 in Sydney before coming fifth in 1992 in Albertville in the 1000m, winning the B final after a fall in the semi-finals.

He carried the flag at the opening ceremony of those Games, before returning for his third Olympics two years later in Lillehammer.

Those Games were overshadowed by an injury suffered by O’Reilly’s then girlfriend, Monique Velzeboer six weeks before it started.

He said: “1994 was a complete disaster. My girlfriend at the time, Monique Velzeboer, was a Dutch skater. Six weeks before the Games in Lillehammer, she unfortunately had a tragic skating accident.

“She became paralysed and I seriously considered not competing in the Games. It’s easy to say afterwards but I was certainly not ready mentally, the emotional shock of it.

“I remember the commentary on NBC as I walked into the venue. The commentator said: ‘The flamboyant bounce of Wilf O’Reilly doesn’t seem to be there’. And that was before I’d even skated. So it was something that was showing, even though I wasn’t aware.

“Even today, many years on from that, it’s still something that I ask the question why. The simple answer I keep telling myself is that I’m the person who could deal with it the best.”

When he decided that it was the right moment to call it a day, O’Reilly was living part-time in the Netherlands, and made the move over there on a full-time basis.

He was quickly offered the opportunity to coach the Dutch short track team. O’Reilly had spent his career struggling to get time on the ice and having to go to rinks at midnight to train. Coaching in the Netherlands came as quite a shock where speed skaters are treated like kings.

There was something of a strange parallel that as he went to Holland to be a short track coach, Dutch football great Ruud Gullit went the other way as he became Chelsea manager.

“The BBC even did a piece about it, this British guy is going to Holland to teach the Dutch how to skate better and we have a Dutch footballer going to the UK to teach the British how to play football better. It was quite an ironic exchange programme!”

He has now been in the Netherlands for 26 years, moving from the head coach role with the Dutch federation to heading up their whole short track programme, from grassroots to the highest level.

And where most teams are incredibly secretive about their methods, always searching for the edge, O’Reilly and the Dutch have a different approach.

He explained: “We have a philosophy that if you keep doing what you did, you’ll get what you got. So we have the approach that we’ll tell all our competitors exactly what we are doing and we allow people to come and train with us, so there are no secrets. But that forces us to work harder to create new things.”

Short track has certainly changed in the 34 years since O’Reilly’s medals in Calgary. Elise Christie’s success and Olympic heartbreak has been an enduring image of the past two Olympics, while it is second only to ice hockey in terms of ticket demands at the Games.

But it all began when a young lad from Birmingham changed his mind about jacking it all in while doing his laundry in the dead of night.

Sportsbeat 2022