Patrick Comerford
The closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics takes place today, and already many of the Irish medal winners have returned home to great acclaim.
But there is good reason to be proud of all 134 Irish competitors, including Niall Comerford, who played a key role in in Paris earlier as part of the Irish men’s Rugby Sevens.
Ireland’s Olympic heroes are to be honoured at a public homecoming event in Dublin tomorrow (Monday) afternoon, with a civic reception hosted by Dublin City Council at the GPO on O’Connell Street at 12:30. Team Ireland has won seven medals on seven consequtive days, four gold and three bronze, making the Paris games this year the most successful Olympic Games for Ireland ever.
But the Games are not over yet. The Paralympic Games take place in Paris from 28 August to 8 September, and the Winter Olympics take place in Milan in 2026. Indeed, there are many Comerford family members who have Olympic hopes.
Sprinter Orla Comerford from Raheny in Dublin is one of the athletes spearheading Ireland’s five-member athletics team in the Paralympic Games in Paris. The games open in two weeks’ time, on 28 August, and continue until 8 September.
Orla Comerford and 1500 metre runner Greta Streimikyte are both competing in their third Games. They will be joined by Mary Fitzgerald, Shauna Bocquet and Aaron Shorten.
Orla Comerford of Raheny Shamrocks qualified for the first female athletics slot for Ireland last year at the World Para-Athletics Championships in Paris in July 2023, finishing fourth, just 0.06 seconds off the bronze medal in the 100 metres T13 final.
She has gone from strength to strength recently, dipping under 12 seconds for the first time at the National Senior Track and Field Championships when she lowered her personal best to 11.90 in her T13 1500m event.
Orla Comerford was born in Dublin in 1997. She was involved in sports from a young age but always enjoyed athletics more than any other sport. She joined her local athletics club, Raheny Shamrocks, at the age of 7 and has been competing for them ever since. She went to school at Loreto on the Green and has studied Fine Art, Media and education at the National College of Art and Design, despite losing some of her eyesight when she was in the 5th class at school.
Her childhood hero was Usain Bolt, and at the age of 16 she decided to focus solely on athletics. She went on to achieve her dream of running for Ireland, representing her country for the first time in 2016. She competed at the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro and the 2020 Games in Tokyo in 2021.
Over the last few years, she effectively had to start all over again. Persistent foot and ankle issues meant she had to break down her stride and relearn everything. At one stage, she took eight months off the track to build up her hamstrings.
With no competition, she lost funding, and missed out on the season in 2022. But it was a long-term plan with Paris 2024 in mind, and her goal is now set on competing and being more successful at the games in Paris later this month. She heads to Paris as one of Ireland’s leading track medal hopes.
Mallory Comerford is a professional swimmer who was hoping to compete for the US in the Paris Olympics this year. She was born in 1997 and is a competitive swimmer specialising in freestyle events.
Mallory Comerford was the winner of five gold medals at the 2017 World Aquatics Championships. She won USA Swimming’s Golden Goggle Award for Breakout Performer of the Year for 2017. The following year, she won eight medals in individual and relay events at the 2018 World Swimming Championships.
She is a member of the Cali Condors swim team, which is part of the International Swimming League.
Mallory Comerford is originally from Kalamazoo, Michigan. She studied at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, where she was a four times NCAA Champion, multiple-time ACC Swimmer of the Year, and Adidas High-Performance Athlete of the Year.
Another hopeful Olympic athlete has been the Canadian fencer Shannon Comerford. Her father, Archdeacon Henry Montgomery Comerford of Saskatoon, was born in Dublin in 1954. He retired in 2016, and with his wife Sara continued to run a family business producing honey, Sun River Honey.
Her grandfather, the Revd Philip Henry Comerford (1909-2006), was born in Dublin and worked as a joiner and draftsman with Irish Railways before leaving Ireland to work as a missionary in Paraguay from 1938 to 1948. Philip returned to Ireland in 1948, and in r 1952, he married Maude Montgomery of Shamrock Street, off Blessington Street, in Saint Mary’s Church, Dublin. Their wedding was conducted by the Revd Norman David Emerson, later Dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin (1962-1966).
Philip and Maude Comerford emigrated to Canada in 1961 with their children. After studying at Emmanuel College, Saskatoon, he was ordained in the Anglican Church of Canada. He died in Saskatoon in 2006 and his funeral took Saint John’s Anglican Cathedral, Saskatoon.
Shannon Comerford was raised on her father’s honey farm outside Saskatoon. She is both an athlete and farmer, both demanding maximum efforts. She was also an Olympic hopeful for the Tokyo 2020 Games in 2021. Shannon began fencing when she was 8-years-old following in the footsteps of her brother Aaron. She was part of the Canadian women’s foil team placed sixth at the 2018 World Championships as well as achieving a best world ranking of sixth overall.
At the time, she said, ‘My sport aspirations of competing at the Olympics has always been the number one goal. Since I started fencing, I have always dreamed of competing with the world’s best on the biggest stage. I was part of the qualification process for London 2012 and Rio 2016 and … Tokyo 2020 …’ But life as an athlete and her road to the Olympics has not always been easy. Her journey was disrupted in 2011 when she tore her left knee ACL right before the Olympic qualification.
Shannon came out as gay when she was 19. Her family had always taught love and inclusion. They have always gone to bat for her and have consistently, without fail, been her solid foundation, she says. Although her coming out was no exception to her family’s inclusivity, she still had a world of homophobia and gender-based discrimination in front of her.
‘Homophobia and heteronormativity are everywhere and they (her parents) couldn’t protect me from the world,’ she said. ‘I still struggled with being different. It took me a long time to feel comfortable identifying as gay but it’s the best thing I ever did for myself!’
She says her wife Meghan is ‘incredibly supportive’ and they have an ‘amazing daughter whose love of life astounds me every day. I’d say, yea, the coming out part is hard, but trust me, the family part is all worth it.’
Meanwhile, Cormac Comerford from Glenageary in south Dublin is hoping to represent Ireland in skiing at the Winter Olympics in Milan in 2026. He is one of eight recipients of the Olympic Federation of Ireland’s Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Scholarships.
The 27-year-old has his eyes firmly set on securing a place at the 2026 Games in Milan-Cortina in the slalom or giant slalom. Cormac Comerford says skiing has been his obsession ever since he first shot down the dry slope in Kilternan as an eight-year-old.
He said: ‘When I first put skis on and felt the rush of going down a hill, there is nothing like it, the adrenaline you get from going down the slopes. Gliding down that hill and catching it edge to edge … There is no feeling like it. It’s like flying. I’ve never experienced it any other way and that’s what drove me to want more.’
Ireland has been sending teams to the Winter Olympics for many years, but it is 22 years since Dublin-born Clifton Wrottesley (Lord Wrottesley) came up one place shy of a medal for Ireland in the skeleton at the Salt Lake City Games in 2002.
Cormac Comerford’s Olympic scholarship means fewer pressures in a sport that costs him €40,000 a year to compete in. This is important for him, as he remembers how hard it was when first started out professionally after starting to study engineering at TU Dublin. His summer work included ‘a lot of sailing instruction and labour on construction sites.’
He says he spent too many of his early years on the circuit sleeping in bus stations and carting a ski bag the weight of his own body to different events and different countries in order to shave pennies off his budget.
It took him six years to qualify for his engineering degree because of the time spent away from home. He could, as he joked himself, be a doctor by now. But scholarships from Trinity, FBD and this latest contribution from the Olympic Federation of Ireland have been critical in allowing him to stay on track and in pursuit of his dream.
He competed in the World Championships in 2017 for first time. He says he is now at his peak, among the top five per cent in the world, 23rd in the World Championships, ‘and hopefully going a lot higher.’
Corman Comerford found that breaking into a sport where Ireland have no tradition was hard, and his achievements were often belittled. ‘I remember watching Shane O’Connor on the TV at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver and thinking, ‘Imagine if I could do that, how cool would that be?’ So going into Milan-Cortina would be massive for me. To achieve that childhood dream would be the cherry on the cake.’
