Thank you
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Women’s 400m hurdle heats. Bol and McLaughlin Levrone. Two of the generational juggernauts of track and field.
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Mcilroy birdies the first. Quite a lot of support for him.
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He’s loved in France.
Yeah I have it here now
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I’d be inclined to think that we are finally seeing a dividend from the establishment of the Sports Council in 1999 and the development of Sports Campus Ireland and the National Aquatic Centre.
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There’s a slight despondency in Greg’s voice here that he is not reporting from the course
Problem for Rory is that Rahm, Sheffler and Xander are amongst the guys ahead of him. Formidable
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Women’s road race is on this afternoon. Similar route to the men but only twice up by Sacre Coeur. Big favourites Lotte Kopecky and Demi Vollering. If it comes down to a sprint maybe Lorena Wiebes from the Dutch. Dark horse Kasia Niewiadoma who I’d expect to do well on the final climb. She often jumps the gun though.
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Also on NZ SKY SPORTS 6
Daniel Wiffen: I had no doubt. I had this won before I walked out
Disqualified from his first race for diving in before the buzzer, but the 23-year-old is now an Olympic champion – and still gets asked about his appearance in Game of Thrones
Wiffen is the first Irish swimmer to break an Olympic record and win a gold medal
UESLEI MARCELINO/REUTERS
Sunday August 04 2024, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
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After his race on Tuesday night Daniel Wiffen flopped back into his room at the Olympic Village around 1.30am, ate some pizza and gave his gold medal the spare bed. Sleep didn’t come for hours. How could it? He found the RTÉ commentary of his race and soaked it in. Then he watched his own race video, seeking confirmation of the things he already knew.
“I was pretty happy with my technique,” he says. “Obviously being the first hand on the wall was most important. But I perfectly planned it, apart from the first 300 metres that were pretty ropey.”
It was 3.30am when he eventually drifted off. The following morning he made a beeline for the dining hall that doles out the sumptuous chocolate muffins he had promised himself the night before. Taste rating?
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“Nine out of ten,” he says.
The rest of the day was spent holding back a tide of calls on his time. His twin brother Nathan and his parents did some talking to the circling media. On Tuesday night Wiffen had talked about looking forward to the next time he could see them again. But they are with him, walking every step of the week.
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They were with him in the gentle stream of tears as Wiffen stood on the podium and the anthem played. “I never cry, which was surprising,” he says. “But [the feeling], I kind of expected it.”
They were there driving him in that excruciating last length to the wall, Wiffen’s arms burning like molten steel. When the twins were young, their father Jonathan would bring them swimming to Lisburn every morning and sit poolside with the other dads, catching up on work. After Jonathan moved to India to work, their mother Rachel collected them at school in Armagh with dinners to eat on the way to Lurgan for training, then more dinners when they came home.
Nathan and Daniel were both in the 1,500m freestyle final during the European Short Course Swimming Championships last year, with Daniel taking gold
ANDREA STACCIOLI/INSIDEFOTO/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES
Swimming was their world. Their obsession. When an Olympic gold medal needed winning, Wiffen’s mind returned to those mornings in Lisburn, the dinners swallowed like Tic Tacs.
“When you’re going down that last 50 metres you think about all your best memories,” he says. “And mine are full of my parents and all they did to make me the swimmer I am. They’re the reason I won the medal at the end.”
He often wondered why they did it. Their older brother Ben had pulled his brothers into swimming but neither seemed exceptional. In his first 1,500m race, Daniel dived in before the buzzer. Then Nathan fell in. Jonathan was the poolside announcer, obliged to tell everyone Daniel had been disqualified.
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They torture and push each other like brothers do, but the link is unbreakable. When Daniel preferred the United States to Loughborough for their swimming scholarships, Nathan won the argument. On Tuesday night Wiffen somehow picked out his brother’s voice in the extraordinary din, connected like sonar.
“Go Daniel!”
“I don’t know how I heard it,” he says. “I was like, that’s incredible. My head was like, this is just meant to be.
“He’s my twin. It’s kind of crazy that he’s in the stands watching me win Olympic gold and he’s done everything to help me as well. We trained in Dublin together until I had to leave for Paris. It’s really good to have him there because he keeps me grounded. He made sure to let me know that it wasn’t going to come easy.”
In every way, Wiffen’s ambition obliged him to reject every accepted norm, from facilities and opportunities to Irish swimming’s modest expectations. At Loughborough Wiffen found himself at the tail end of an elite group weighed down with Olympic medals and aspiring champions. Gradually he reeled them in.
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Wiffen heard his twin brother’s shouts of encouragement on his way to gold in the 800m freestyle
CHRISTIAN LIEWIG/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES
“I started from the bottom but I grinded and worked hard every single day. One hundred per cent I always believed something special was coming. I wasn’t a great swimmer when I was younger and plenty of coaches said I wasn’t going to make it. But I love the sport. I love training. And it’s that love for the sport that makes me keep achieving.”
Olympic medals weren’t what drove him either. It was being first, breaking boundaries. In the past two years Wiffen had already become the first Irish male swimmer to set world and European records. He was the first Irish Commonwealth champion (where he competed for Northern Ireland in 2022) and the first Irish world champion. Making an Olympic final and winning a medal broke more new ground. Running back through his collection of national records, he reckons he’s set between 50 and 60.
“I’m still achieving firsts,” he says. “First Irish swimmer to break an Olympic record and win a gold medal [in an 800m freestyle final]. And there’s still a lot more I can do.”
It was a night boiled down in the first telling to Wiffen, all brash confidence, rechristening himself Olympic champion on television and naming a thunderous downpour outside as Storm Daniel. But these moments of supreme triumph always peel back the skin.
“The only difference from a normal day is that I was shitting myself. I’ve never been this nervous, which is obviously not weird to say in the Olympic final, but I couldn’t even nap. That was the weirdest thing.”
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Finke, left, and Paltrinieri were on the podium in the 800m freestyle and credit Wiffen for pushing them in practice
MATTHIAS SCHRADER/AP
That afternoon Jon Rudd, the high performance director with Swim Ireland, put Wiffen in a car and found a quiet swimming pool. They talked in the car about everything: swimming, college, family. “Life stuff,” Rudd says. “I’m a dad of four. It’s like me sitting there with one of my sons.”
The purpose of the trip was a simple swim to ease out the joints and soothe any strains. Then Wiffen asked Rudd if he had a watch.
“Time me for a 100, will you?”
“Really,” replied Rudd. “We said we weren’t doing this.”
“No,” Wiffen said. “I need to know.’
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“He gracefully slid up and down the pool in a ridiculously fast time for someone who looked like they were doing nothing,” Rudd says. “He said: ‘Don’t tell me the time, I’m going to guess.’ ”
Wiffen was a second off. He was swimming quicker than he thought. Sometimes the best ones need that extra prompt to reassure them that they’re ready. “He was,” Rudd says.
That self-belief coursed through him in the call room before the 800m final. “I had no doubt in my mind,” Wiffen says. “I had this won already before I walked out. I knew there would be nerves. I was in lane four in an Olympic final. But when you’re winning in lane four it’s even better.”
An hour after winning his gold medal Wiffen sat in front of the assembled global swim media flanked by the silver and bronze medallists: the defending Olympic champion Bobby Finke, famed for his lethal kick, and Gregorio Paltrinieri, a renowned veteran of long-distance swimming. The questions went everywhere.
What reception did Wiffen expect back home?
“I’m sure it’s gonna be massive. I remember the last Olympics when the rowing boys brought back their gold. It was crazy.”
What did he remember from being an extra in Game of Thrones with Nathan?
“I was in the greatest TV show of all time, I was in the Red Wedding scene. All I remember, I was sitting on a step in front of Walder Frey or Filch from Harry Potter (the actor David Bradley). He’s a very nice man.”
Do you want to get back into acting?
“If they want to catch me in the summer, I don’t mind.”
The twins were both part of Game of Thrones, with the Red Wedding’s interior scenes filmed in Belfast
WIFFEN FAMILY
Finke and Paltrinieri smiled along in amusement. They have seen Wiffen develop. They have tracked and hunted him. His great strength as an endurance swimmer is the metronomic recording of splits that scarcely drift more than a few tenths of a second from each other. Where some swimmers blitz the field early and others unleash a final late kick, Wiffen’s consistency is designed to wear down every competitor into gradual, agonising death by a thousand strokes.
“He’s young and he’s going to be doing really well in the future,” Finke says. “He loves to train. I’ve seen his vlogs before. Sometimes I use it to motivate me in practice. Just seeing what he’s doing and how he’s approaching and the records he wants to break. I’m really excited to see what he can do when I’m done with this work.”
“Yeah, same,” Paltrinieri says. “I watched the vlog. I’ve been around for a while, so I saw a lot of guys coming. He’s a great competitor and he pushes me every time, every day in practice, because I know he’s pushing as well. Today I was telling everybody that you [Daniel] were the favourite, to put pressure on you and not on me. That was the plan for me: not to think that [he] was the favourite…”
Paltrinieri paused, taking a moment to accept the failure of the conceit he had sold himself. “But I really thought he was the best in the field today.”
Wiffen returned to the pool on Saturday morning to obliterate the opposition in his heat of the 1,500m freestyle. He hunts more gold on Sunday in the event that always looked his strongest, with the 10km Seine swim on Friday still blue-tacked to the back of his mind.
“Once I get in the water I know I’m the best prepared in the whole field,” he says. “Maybe it’s a special connection. I couldn’t tell you.”
Like nothing we’ve ever seen before.
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This 400m hurdles seems to be an stroll around with a little hop every now and again
None of them seem to be flat out
Tuthill would need to be twice the size to compete with some of those she’s up against
A regular metabolism working against her.
Seems like a lovely girl, happy it went well for her after a shakey start. She can surely improve a nice bit over the next few years
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Does every Irish athlete have to start every answer with “Yeah, no” when interviewed?
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Yeah.
No.
Some haul of medals under Minister Martins watch
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She deserves great credit.
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