Who better than Daniel Wiffen to enlighten us on the essential reasons why he won his first Olympic swimming gold medal in the French capital last Tuesday.
He was born on Bastille Day. It was two days after his home county Armagh won the All-Ireland football title for only the second time in 140 years. He was in Paris, the same city where Ireland first competed as an independent nation at the 1924 Games a century before.
Then about an hour before his 800m freestyle final inside the Paris La Défense Arena, a thunder and lightning storm ripped across the Parisian sky. “I said to my coach we’re renaming that Storm Daniel,” Wiffen jested soon afterwards, his gold medal hanging around his neck.
He may have missed something else. It was also 100 years since Jack B Yeats, younger brother of William, won his silver medal in Paris, back when they were also awarded for works of art inspired by sport, with his suitably swimming-themed painting The Liffey Swim.
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Wiffen’s gold stars had unquestionably aligned, but if Irish swimming was resting its hopes solely on all that sort of coincidental stuff it could be a long time before another medal is won.
In truth the reasons behind Wiffen’s medal success and that of Mona McSharry in the 100m breaststroke 24 hours earlier are far more concrete, the next Irish swimming medal already coming into view.
Wiffen is back in the pool Saturday for his 1,500m heat, by his own admission his better event, with every chance of winning his second gold medal in Sunday’s final. Then he’ll become Ireland’s first competitor in the 10km marathon swim, set for the river Seine, confident he can win another medal there too.
Even with all the progress of Irish swimming over the last decade, Paris has marked a seismic shift. What is certain is that the sport in this country has moved irreversibly on from the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, when an opening paragraph in a report attributed to Peter Byrne of this newspaper read: “It was a memorable morning for Irish swimming here in the Olympic pool. Nobody drowned.”
When it came to Olympic swimming Ireland had always been that island nation that struggled in the water.
No man is better qualified to explain the reasons behind this seismic shift than John Rudd, Swim Ireland’s high performance director since 2017 who oversees the national training centres in Dublin and Limerick.
Rudd describes what has so far unfolded for Irish swimming in Paris as “not the beginning of the journey, but we’re nowhere near the finish of it”. Wiffen and McSharry are leading the way, and plenty others are following suit.
“This is a new generation,” he says. “They walk tall, heads high. You walk into a swimming venue now with Ireland written on you and people will go ‘well, there’s Ireland’. And not so long ago we would have been sat in the corner and hopeful that we just crept into a semi-final. It’s this crop of athletes that have done that.
“But raising the quality and quantity of domestic swimming is still key. We’ve all seen the pyramid of performance, and it’s not just about big numbers at the bottom, it’s about big numbers at the bottom that are good, and get what they need, have coaches who know what they’re doing, and they’re in good clubs. With a good domestic competition structure in place. Then that filters through into your junior international swimming, and then that filters up again.”
Before the delayed Tokyo Olympics three years ago, Michelle Smith de Bruin was the first and last Irish swimmer in modern times to make it to an Olympic final, on her way to three gold medals and a bronze in Atlanta 1996. She was banned from the sport two years later for manipulating a urine sample taken by Irish testers at her home in Kilkenny.
That continued to be one of the main talking points in Irish Olympic swimming until McSharry finally ended the wait to become the second, making the 100m breaststroke final in Tokyo.
At the start of day five of the Olympic swimming programme Ireland were lying in sixth on the medal table, the best ever start by a combination of Irish swimmers in Olympic history. Irish swimmers had made three finals already; Wiffen and McSharry also joined by Ellen Walshe, who made the 400m medley final, where she finished in eighth.
Day six started with Tom Hannon continuing that momentum when setting an Irish record in the 50m freestyle, his 21.79 seconds eclipsing the mark set just last month by Shane Ryan. Qualifying for the semi-finals ranked sixth, that already made Fannon Ireland’s top performer in the Olympics in this event – and he later improved his record again to 21.74, just .10 from making the final, ranked 10th best in the pure-speed event.
Wiffen broke the Olympic and his own European record when winning the 800m, and last December also became the first Irish swimmer to break a world record – something no other Irish swimmer had even challenged before.
Still other challenges remain. There are still only six 50-metre pools on the entire island, including two in the North, and none at all in cities like Cork and Galway.
The first only opened in 2000 at the private Westwood gym in Clontarf, before the National Aquatic Centre in Abbotstown was opened in 2002 after a decade of campaigning, and only completed after a final tranche of funding was made available to host the Special Olympics in 2003.
“You need a swimming pool in every reasonably-sized population on the island,” says Rudd, the former schoolteacher in Plymouth. “Because this is a life skill, an essential part of life’s tapestry. If we don’t get kids into a swimming pool early it’s almost as wrong as not learning to read, write or do their sums.
“We’ve got a lot of towns and areas with a reasonably-sized population where it is too far to travel to get a warm swimming pool in the winter months. Swimming in an outdoor lake or river is just not feasible.
“Where that comes from is a multi-responsibility There are all sorts of agencies that need to work on that and we can have an influence on it, but we don’t own swimming. We absolutely state our case, but we need to win the hearts and minds of those that make the decisions.”
Most swimming clubs across the country are already at full capacity, most also have long waiting lists for any future members. Swim Ireland will also publish a new strategic plan in September, and infrastructure will be listed as a priority for the first time.
Still, compare this system to 20 years ago, before the Athens Games. Ireland only qualified two swimmers, Michael Williamson and Emma Robinson, and neither made it out of the heats. Between Sydney and Tokyo Ireland also sent 21 swimmers to the Olympics, and only two swimmers, Andrew Bree and Shane Ryan, progressed from their heats.
The team for Paris is 12 swimmers, including two women’s relay teams (for the first time since 1972), with two more qualifying in diving.
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Wiffen is based at Loughborough University in England, McSharry at the University of Tennessee in the US, and Rudd believes those sorts of options should always be part of the Swim Ireland system.
“What is important is that they find the right environment for them, regardless of geography. Mona went to a US university and succeeded where others have not succeeded. Daniel has gone to an English university and succeeded, others haven’t.
“Of course we’d love to have all of our athletes based on the island full time, but if there’s something else out there that pushes them on a little bit more we’ve got to try to facilitate that. Another big piece for us here was getting all four provinces to do pretty much the same thing at the same time. And all that falls into a national system that people understand.”
One that is also doing the nation proud.
