Last month, a Tweet that perfectly encapsulated the reality of Irish dancing struck a chord with thousands of people. It read: “An Irish dancer has just effortlessly breezed his way through a heinous programme of physical and psychological torture on SAS Who Dares Wins and I’m just sat here thinking… what on EARTH do they put them through at Irish dancing school.”
The curious poster was of course referring to Lord of The Dance’s Connor Smyth winning the notoriously brutal TV show that replicates the British Special Forces selection process. It’s no surprise that the Tweet garnered the viral popularity it did – it was an exaggerated but flattering acknowledgment of the years of ruthless training that Irish dancers go through. “I just thought it was brilliant,” Connor says. “Ultimately what I wanted to do was just showcase dancers in the best possible light. And I feel like that tweet was literally the epitome of what I was wanting to do.”
The 31-year-old dancer from Newtownards, County Down in Northern Ireland, consistently delivered throughout the six episodes (filmed across two weeks), of SAS: Who Dares Wins. The show’s instructors often voiced their disbelief that he had no prior military training, while Connor insisted he simply had Irish dancing to thank. “When you think about it, the training that we do go through when we’re kids, Irish dancing teachers are renowned for being so strict,” Connor says. “I remember my very first Irish dance teacher, I was so scared of her. But at the same time, that makes you better and you don’t realize it.”
Connor started dancing aged six with the St Patrick’s School of Irish dance, before moving to Reilly, both Festival schools. At age 17 he moved to CLRG to dance for the Armstrong School, retiring from competition at 21, but he insists he didn’t compete much. “It was a bit awful,” he says, remembering how he didn’t recall at the only CLRG World Championships he competed at. “And I’ve been in Lord of the Dance for eight years. So it just goes to show you, it’s not always about your technical ability.”
“I remember my very first Irish dance teacher, I was so scared of her. But at the same time, that makes you better and you don’t realize it.”
Connor Smyth
But despite years of Irish dance training, SAS: Who Dares Wins was a completely unprecedented challenge for Connor that would push him physically and mentally more than ever before. After being sent home early from a European tour with Lord of the Dance last year due to the Covid pandemic, he decided to fill in an application for the Channel 4 show, with slim hopes of making it through the preliminary stages. After fitness tests, interviews, and meetings with casting producers, he received a call to tell him he would either be a recruit or a reserve. Just nine weeks before he was due to leave, he began a rigorous training regime with his sister Lynsey, who is a personal trainer.
Every day would start with a 6AM training session before a day of labouring, usually followed by a five mile run in the evening, and cold water training in the Irish Sea. He would also do weighted hikes with a 25kg backpack or car tires, along with swimming and high-intensity training. “I actually loved the journey,” he says. “It was really tough. There were many mornings where it would have been easy to turn the alarm off, but I think because I was just put under so much pressure…I certainly felt like I had the weight of the dancing world on my shoulders.”
Part of this pressure stemmed from Connor’s determination to show the wider world just how tough Irish dancers are. Growing up he was exposed to bullying for doing something that was not considered traditionally masculine. “In the playground at school…if you’d done something wrong, if you missed a shot or if you let a goal in or something, it would be like, “Oh dear here’s the dancer,’” he says. “Kids can be cruel calling you a sissy, calling you a wimp, telling me that ‘you’re gay’, even when you’re just a kid.” The teasing grew worse in his early teen years at grammar school which brought him close to quitting. But his mother reminded him that he could be a professional dancer one day and prove everyone wrong, which kept him going. Irish dancing is also very much in Connor’s blood, growing up in a family of seven siblings who all danced at one point, including Riverdance lead and former Irish Dance Globe cover star Lauren Smyth.
“There’s no director saying ‘cut, go and get a cup of tea.’”
Connor Smyth
Fast forward approximately 18 years, and Connor was on national TV as recruit number 16, outperforming nearly everyone else who joined him on the mock SAS selection course. Real life British Special Forces selection is notoriously brutal. Lasting around five months, there is a staggering 90% failure rate. On the TV show, the course is condensed into two weeks, made up of multiple endurance, fitness, mental, and skill based tasks. It would be tempting to assume that certain elements may be exaggerated or staged for TV, but Connor insists the audience doesn’t even see the full picture. “When we got there on day one, the way the directing staff put it was, ‘This is our course, we’ve made this course, and it’s a course first and foremost, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,’” he says. “There’s no director saying ‘cut, go and get a cup of tea.’” Many elements of the course are also not shown, such as regular spot checks, kit inspections, nightwatch shifts, and often just two to three hours of sleep a night.
One infamous part of the show that fails many people is the “resistance to interrogation”, which Connor reflects on as the most difficult part of the experience. “Going into the course, I knew I was fit, I knew I was strong,” he says. “Then the only thing really in my mind was interrogation…but you can’t really prepare for it because it is so extreme.” This stage of the course consisted of 11 to 12 hours of stress positions and listening to distressing sensory deprivation audio while blindfolded, which included white noise, crying babies, squealing pigs, and drills. To distract his mind, Connor would review the entire choreography for Lord of the Dance, which he says he must have done more than 100 times. “I just tried to get through every minute,” he says. “There were times where I was like, ‘Can I do this for any longer?’”
“People don’t understand how hard we work as professional dancers, and there’s so much pressure put on us on a day to day basis.”
Connor Smyth
Despite going through an “absolutely horrendous” 12 days of unrivalled challenges and hardship, Connor came out on top with one other recruit out of 21 people. “It was just an outpouring of emotions,” he says. “I just felt as if I had proven my point. I wanted to showcase how strong, fit, mentally strong as well, robust and resilient Irish dancers are.” He adds: “People don’t understand how hard we work as professional dancers, and there’s so much pressure put on us on a day to day basis with Lord of the dance. The standards are so high, but ultimately that makes you better.”
Connor has come a long way from the days of being embarrassed about his Irish dancing, and hopes that no other young boys will have to go through what he did. “The most amazing messages that I got were from young lads or Irish dance teachers, or parents of young boys who are dancing…that’s what I was trying to do, was trying to get young lads to feel comfortable about who they are, about what they do, and be proud of what they do.”
Connor’s triumph on the show helped him kickstart his new online training programme, Fit ID, with his sister Lynsey. “I definitely took confidence from the course and thought, if I can do that, let’s do this and give it our all,” he says. Connor was able to return the favour to his sister by helping her train for her first ever Lord of the Dance shows in Taiwan last December. “Lynsey was there for my personal training and all the coaching aspects, but she was also there kind of emotionally,” he says. “We had two amazing journeys and it was really nice to kind of help each other be better versions of yourself.”
“[I] was trying to get young lads to feel comfortable about who they are, about what they do, and be proud of what they do.”
Connor Smyth
Connor says he still has “unfinished business” with his professional dance career, and last year he began training for one of the lead roles with Lord of the Dance. If the course showed him anything, it was the importance of “having the drive to be the best every single day” and “doing things to a high standard consistently”. “You come out of that course with a real sense of confidence that you can take on any challenge,” he says. “No matter what it is that you want, if you really want it, you can do it.”
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