![Jordan Conroy in action for Ireland against Samoa during the HSBC Rugby Sevens Series in Hong Kong. 'Having a year [before the Olympic Games] would be more relaxed, more time to try to prepare.' Photograph: Martin Seras Lima](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/4KY3EPVM5WB7OHKAGXLUFJOZTI.jpg?auth=62d68033e6cb809983f74af808c3766b6f78473b6052523db4d27369d37dd4db&smart=true&width=1024&height=683)
At 29 Jordan Conroy is walking a less certain rugby path than ever before.
The fulfilment of another Olympic Games and the commitment to his band of brothers on the Irish Sevens rugby team is on one side, what to do next on the other.
When four-year Olympic cycles dominate the rhythm of a sport, it’s not next year or the year after but what the wallpaper will look like for a 33-year-old, whose currency is speed.
With that, Conroy can’t escape from what-to-do-next thoughts that at a certain age suddenly take hold. For Conroy these are moments of seeking clarity as Ireland begin their Olympic qualification tournament in Krakow, Poland on Sunday. A win, nothing less, will have them in Paris next summer.
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A superstar on the Sevens circuit, a model, a Dancing with the Stars celebrity, Conroy’s life is like one dreamed up in a travel candy store. Every year his job takes in destinations in Hong Kong, Dubai, Cape Town, Sydney, Los Angeles and Vancouver. Like a Formula One oval ball circuit, Sevens is the fizz and pop end of rugby where the sun never fails to shine.
“I loved it in the first half of my 20s,” he says. “I was young. I was wild. It was great. As you get older it changes. I still love going to tournaments. But it’s actually to play the tournament in the stadium with the fans. When I was younger, I wanted to see this and that in the country. I wanted to explore it.
“Now it’s about performing on the pitch, making a name for myself and be remembered. I don’t know if that has come with wisdom or age or just getting older. But I feel that has changed in my mentality. I kind of found myself as a player and who I am and what I bring. It’s enjoyable to have that kind of status. Be a good rugby player but also have a bit of a personality on the side. I’m 29 now. I started this at 21.”
Sevens is the party animal to its imposing 15s big brother with its game-altering scrums and lineouts and Conroy’s seven years has seen great change since the Ireland head coach, Anthony Eddy, discovered his talents watching a YouTube clip in 2016.
Scoring from a kick-off for Buccaneers, Conroy’s greatest natural resource, his pace, caught the eye of the coach, who invited him for a trial. He debuted for Ireland in 2016 at a tournament in Amsterdam.
It is only in recent years Sevens has tracked more centre stage. Although still in the shadow of 15s, Olympic recognition conferred a global status that no amount of glitzy stadium parties could have commanded. In that pool, even as an amateur Conroy stood out because he scored tries. He’s the first Irish player to score over 100. A point of difference is that the former footballer and athlete looks good doing it.
That’s why two months after the Tokyo Olympics his email alerted. Like Eddy had several years earlier, RTÉ had also seen Conroy’s sparkle. They mentioned Dancing with the Stars and his personality. He replied it all sounded interesting and a few weeks later, in his first foray into a different kind of glamour world, they had him paired with Georgian choreographer and professional dancer, Salome Chachua.
“I was thinking you know what, it’s a great opportunity. You know why not, get my name out there build up the profile,” says Conroy. “I just went with it, my gut instinct and to be honest, it was never what I thought it would be. It was such a massive learning for me. I was out of my comfort zone. It was a different kind of learning.
“RTÉ came to me. We had an interview and they said look we love your personality. We think you’re great and then we were paired up with the dancers and it was up to my dancer to teach me all the steps. I remember I just told her ‘look I’m a rugby player. You can shout and push me if you need to. You can really whip to the ground, I’m used to it’.
“It was very, very intense. I never knew that dancing could be so hard on the body. It was also a different kind of fitness. I thought that by doing the dancing I’d lose my fitness. But I didn’t lose one bit. I actually slimmed down from 91 to 85kg. I remember after the dancing at 85kg I went to the Singapore Sevens and felt so light on my feet. It was all from the salsa steps and the samba steps. Just so nimble.”
In 2021 Conroy took part in a HSBC series called The Remarkables where he spoke of his pride in being “half black and half Irish”.
In the series his mother Jennie was also interviewed and it was there she detailed the “extremely abusive marriage” in which she had found herself, when she and her son were living in Germany, where Jordan was born.
In one incident her then ex-husband broke into the house during the night and she woke up to see him standing over her wielding a knife.
It was her child’s determined dash out of the premises that managed to raise the alarm. The incident, she said was “the best thing that ever happened”. It was an experience of extreme serendipity. Because of the seriousness of Jennie’s account, the German judge allowed her travel back to Ireland with her son.
“I packed my bags and I came home,” she said.
Back then, Conroy saw himself as an athlete. His speed was, even as a child, noticeably faster than his peers. Living those early days in Germany he had always seen himself as a runner and his dreams then of the Olympic Games were as an athlete. But it was rugby, not athletics, that offered up the prospect of the five rings, although even with that milestone there is remedial work required.
Qualifying for Tokyo 2020 for the first time made a little piece of history but the players left Japan unfulfilled. They didn’t perform to their expectations, their departure from the Tokyo Stadium not how they had envisaged, finishing third in their pool to South Africa and the USA and missing out on the knock-out quarter-finals phase of the competition.
“Two weeks before the Games we qualified for Tokyo,” says Conroy. “We didn’t have enough of a chance to let it rest and sink in that we actually qualified. Then the next week we were training and preparing for a flight to Tokyo.
“I think all of that combined and then having to go out and try and win a medal, it took a lot out of us mentally and physically. It was disappointing for us from a performance aspect. But having been able to qualify overshadowed that a little because we were making history.
“This weekend, we’re looking to try and do the job and have a gradual build up. Having a year [before the Olympic Games] would be more relaxed, more time to try to prepare, which I think is crucial. That’s what we didn’t have in Tokyo.
“Having a whole year to play the World Series without having the word repechage in the back of your head, just being able to work on things, gel more as a team and then a month before the Olympic Games be able to shift the focus all to that one point. That would be better for us mentally and physically, which we didn’t have last time.”
The players have been professional for no more than three or four years. But competing in the World Series “helped us grow” he believes.
Ireland have won two silver medals and a bronze in the Sevens World Cup and with that comes a degree of confidence. Earlier this month the team won the opening leg of the Rugby Europe Sevens Championship Series in Portugal, stringing together six straight victories, including a 19-10 final triumph over Georgia, one of their main rivals in Poland.
“I mean a lot of lads here have been in this programme from the very beginning,” he says. “Just to be able to share that journey with them once more, tie it up. Realistically I don’t think I’ll be there for the next Olympics. Another four years like . . . the body is going to change. It would be a nice way to wrap up that experience for those lads who have been there and training with each other every day. So, it would be an awesome kind of thing to be able to end the journey with that.”
With change comes the inevitability of choices and decisions to be made. He liked the television side he experienced after Tokyo, he says. He got a taste for it and he would hope to do more. He is not the first. Tommy Bowe, the Ireland and Lions winger and Sevens Olympian Greg O’Shea have both successfully reinvented themselves from professional athletes into television presenters.
“I really want to do more of it,” says Conroy. “That was one of the options after rugby if I could get into TV again and present. Even now I’m doing a lot of talks with Olympic Ireland, kind of getting into public speaking.
“He [Bowe] would be the right one but also my friend Greg O’Shea on the presenting side. He said: ‘look man you have the personality it’s just if you want to do it’. Who knows what will happen? I live in the moment. It’s what I do now to the best of my ability. It’s an interesting avenue to think about. Rugby is not going to last forever. We’ll see what the next venture might be.”
Over the next three days in Krakow, the plan is that venture will be a second Olympic Games.
European Games Sevens Rugby – Henryk Reyman Stadium, Krakow June 25th-27th
Ireland squad: Andrew Smith (Clontarf/Leinster), Bryan Mollen (UCD), Dylan O’Grady (UCD), Gavin Mullin (UCD), Harry McNulty (UCD), Jack Kelly (Dublin University), Jordan Conroy (Buccaneers), Liam McNamara (IQ Rugby), Mark Roche (Lansdowne), Niall Comerford (UCD/Leinster), Terry Kennedy (St Mary’s College), Billy Dardis (Terenure College), Zac Ward (Ballynahinch).
