Daniel Wiffen making no secret of his Olympic ambitions

ON THE RISE: On hand for the announcement of Flogas as the Official Energy Partner of Team Ireland for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games is Olympic swimmer Daniel Wiffen. Pic: INPHO/Bryan Keane

Ireland’s Olympic voice has changed. Matured. Gone is the meek, almost apologetic whisper. In its place is a very modern and confident delivery that finds expression across all sorts of sports and in the most intense of environments.

The country’s boxers and rowers have instilled this new sense of self by winning medals at successive Games, world and continental championships, but others have made strides and shapes in codes where there had been little imprint before.

Rhys McClenaghan is a reigning World and European gymnastics champion who expressed disappointment at the Commonwealth silver he claimed last year. There was no arrogance or entitlement in it, just an honest assessment of expectation and performance.

Jack Woolley and Liam Jegou were among those who went to Tokyo in 2021 talking about podium ambitions. Neither made it but that isn’t to strip anything away from the validity of their goals. This is the new breed and Daniel Wiffen is no different.

A Loughborough University student from Magheralin in Co Down, Wiffen posted three PBs at his first Olympics, in Tokyo in 2021. He followed up with a silver in the 1,500m freestyle at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham last year.

It’s six months since he became the first Irishman to break a European record, in the 800m freestyle, and the sense of someone going places was clear last month with three Irish records in the 400m, 800m and 1,500m at the Stockholm Open Swim Meet.

The latter two were the fastest in the world this year up to that point, his 1,500 mark the eight fastest ever, so Wiffen makes no bones about his intention to do more than just claim podium places at the Worlds in Fukuoka this summer and at the Paris Olympics in 2024.

“We're on this trajectory now. I think that experience that I've gained in Tokyo has made me hungrier, made me want it more. It's made me want to be on that top podium and be one of the best ever because I want to make a...

“I don't want to say legacy, but I want to be remembered after I finish swimming: that I'm going to be one of the best ever Irish swimmers and maybe one of the best Irish sportspeople ever.” 

You couldn’t overstate what he’s achieved already.

Wiffen has torn up the records books, Irish and otherwise, gouging chunks out of his own PBs at regular intervals, and not least in Sweden when that 1,500m time was an astonishing 16.88 seconds faster than anything he had done before.

This being elite international sport, it bears pointing out that he has been operating within the WADA anti-doping programme for some time, and he estimated recently that there are few Irish athletes tested so often. Almost weekly, he reckoned.

His progression in the pool has accelerated since moving to uni in Loughborough where he trains under Andi Manley and as part of a group that includes 2021 World 400m freestyle short-course champion Felix Aublock and Wiffen's twin brother Nathan.

Both are studying computer science and Nathan is competing in the same events with Paris in mind. The hope is that they can push each other along, their competitiveness complemented by the close bond that is so often apparent between twins.

“I wouldn't say we've got telepathy but we can definitely talk to each other without saying it and definitely boost each other. When I see him race or he sees me race and we're on the sidelines I'm saying in my head, trying to tell him to go faster, and you can kind of feel it.” 

The regimen is punishing. Half-a-dozen 500m swim sessions are par for the course for Wiffen whose eagerness for work has been supplemented by a number of altitude camps 2,300m above sea level in the Sierra Nevadas outside Grenada in Spain.

Technique is another work in progress, his devotion to training now dovetailing with an understanding that he needs to go about things smarter than harder, and he rates himself now as a “completely different swimmer” to the one that featured in Tokyo.

As for the other contenders, he can imagine that the rate of his improvement might have taken them by surprise. Nobody, he said, has ever recorded a progression like his. The near-17-second drop in Stockholm he described as “unheard of” and one that shocked people.

He’s still only 21. The next youngest in terms of the main contenders in the 1,500m is the USA’s 23-year old Bobby Finke who won gold at that distance and at the 800m in Tokyo. The Italian Gregorio Paltrinieri is another five years older again.

“I'm the young guy on the stage dropping all these PBs, so they're probably wondering, 'Gee, how fast am I going to have to go to beat him?'. And my answer to that would be, 'You'll need to go a world record to beat me'.” 

*Daniel Wiffen was speaking on the announcement that Flogas, the experts in gas, electricity and renewable energy solutions, has become the Official Energy Partner of Team Ireland for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games