Nathan Wiffen: 'I would say when I stop swimming Daniel will probably stop as well'

Daniel Wiffen OLY, left, and Nathan Wiffen during the annual Team Ireland Olympic Golf Fundraiser at The K Club. Pic: Ben McShane/Sportsfile

Nathan Wiffen tried to explain. Time and again people approached on his way down the Champs Elysees to ask for a picture with the man they thought had just won an Olympic gold for Ireland in the pool. Eventually, he stopped trying.

You know what, he thought? Easier just to smile and give them the snap they wanted. What harm would it do? Daniel and Nathan are identical twins and both of them swimmers. They talk the same, they wear their hair the same. They sport similar glasses.

So he just went with it.

“I was thinking that I was basically helping him out,” he says with a laugh. It’s two years on from that magical week in Paris when Daniel claimed 800m gold and 1500m bronze at the La Defense Arena in the western fringes of the French capital.

Nathan had only missed out on the 2024 Olympics by 0.1 of a second, but he was his brother’s training partner throughout the cycle, and he shared the same sense of relief when Daniel went out and did what they knew was in him.

“I feel like no-one expected it other than our family so it was a shock to everyone else, and he got a lot of attention on him, which knocked him off his 1500. He still obviously got bronze and everyone was, ‘oh well, it’s not gold’. I was like, ‘I wouldn’t mind a bronze’.” The rewards didn’t end on the podium.

Daniel was now Ireland’s youngest ever Olympic champion. There were invites to cool Parisian parties, chinwags with Shane Lowry and other celebs and, in the longer term, sponsorship deals struck with blue-chip companies like Red Bull and Deloitte.

Nathan has benefited from those perks and others, and he will share the house his brother is buying in Dublin this summer on the back of his successes and the profile they have helped build online together as they both look to the 2028 Games in LA.

It’s a plus side that he doesn’t hesitate to highlight, but it can’t always be easy to exist in the same orbit as a twin sibling who is so outlandishly successful. Daniel has a no-nonsense way of calling a spade a spade. Nathan, thankfully, is no different.

“I obviously have to learn to accept it because it is always going to happen, but a lot more people now are coming up to me and Daniel because of the Wiffen Twins [videos they produce on YouTube]. It’s not as bad now as it used to be.

“It used to be very awkward. Daniel would be asked for a photo and I would be standing somewhere over there. Just sit and watch him get photos taken. I’m a lot older now and it doesn’t really bother me either. Sometimes it takes a toll on you but you get over it.” It’s striking, if hardly surprising, how close they are.

Nathan swaps between first person singular and first person plural, from ‘I’ to ‘we’, time and again as he chats about career and everyday life. The pair of them live together, train and compete together, do their vlogs together, and they hang out and play golf together.

Nathan and Daniel after the Irish Open 1500m Freestyle Final. Pic: Tom O’Hanlon/Inpho

That symbiosis may even stretch to the length of time these 25-year olds keep doing this.

“Peak now for [distance swimming] is, like, 27 so I’m not at that peak yet. Neither is Daniel, which is quite crazy to think of. I don’t know. I’ll probably assess after LA and see what it looks like. It’s hard to say.

“I know Daniel is going on to Brisbane [Olympics in 2032] but I don’t know. I would say when I stop swimming he will probably stop as well. I just don’t think he would enjoy it as much. I don’t think he could train by himself.” 

It was Nathan who decided after their five years studying and swimming out of Loughborough University that the University of California, Berkeley was to be the next step in his journey. Daniel followed him out.

Turned out though that the grass really isn’t always greener on the other side, even in a Golden State offering constant blue skies and a stunning campus that served as backdrop to Hollywood movies like ‘The Graduate’ and ‘Legally Blonde’.

Avid golfers and decent surfers, they had the pick of idyllic courses to play on. Ocean Beach was just over 20 miles away. The athletic facilities were off the charts. The intention when Daniel followed Nathan out was that they would make this a long-term thing.

Now they’re both home and training out of the Swim Ireland high-performance unit at Dublin’s National Aquatic Centre where Steve Beckerleg is head coach but Andi Manley, their old Loughborough mentor, is the man scripting their programmes.

The American dream is on hold until 2028. Why? A few reasons. It was a system and a place that just didn’t suit. Even the distances covered – yards rather than metres – felt wrong. Daniel spoke on his return about issues with the lifestyle and a lack of guidance in the pool.

Unlike his brother, who wasn’t enrolled in Cal, Nathan was there to compete for the university. It meant regular meets through the academic season and he needed to peak for each one, including four times in a five-month period from Christmas on.

The toll it took was all too obvious as he raced Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) meets, NCAA meets and Irish trials in short order, the result being that he missed out on making the Northern Ireland team for the recent Commonwealth Games.

Daniel reckoned he would have been a shoe-in for a bronze in the 1500m in Birmingham, and that the selectors should have cut him some slack, but came home from Glasgow himself with ‘just’ the one silver medal in that very race from his three distances.

It wasn’t the haul the self-declared “medal guarantee” would have targeted. Daniel admitted to nerves and rustiness through his 400m and 800m swims but the pair are banking that the move to Dublin is exactly what they both need after the Cal experiment.

“I feel fitter again,” says Nathan just prior to the Commonwealths. “After America I was in a bit of a hole because they do so much racing and trials and I was exhausted. I qualified for the Europeans [starting in August], came back here and I was dead for like eight weeks.” If he’s playing catch-up then that’s not new.

Nathan was originally a backstroke and fly specialist until a belated turn towards distance freestyle swimming like his brother. It meant working his way up from the bottom rung at Loughborough just to make the uni’s elite squad.

His times and results since are absolutely noteworthy in their own right.

A national champion, he has qualified for Europeans and Worlds, just missing out on a medal at the former when finishing fourth in 2024, and recording an eighth-place finish in the finals at the global version.

The focus now is next week's Europeans in Paris. LA, and making an Olympic final, stands as the ultimate goal but Nathan is straight up in saying that his late start in the distance ranks make it unlikely that he will be adding to the family’s medal collection there.

“I had to learn it for myself and Daniel has said that it will be a lot harder for me… I’m never going to win the Olympics like Daniel has because the chances of me starting late and then getting where Daniel has been going his whole life...

“I would give myself a 0.05% chance, a very low one. My plan is to qualify for LA and then to make the final and it is looking likely in my opinion.”