LIFE IN THE FAST LANE
Breakthrough star Wiffen is getting used to attention
WHEN he was followed into a toilet by a fan seeking an autograph, Daniel Wiffen understood the dimensions of his new profile.
Nothing seems to rattle the 22year-old from the village of Magheralin.
In fact, it’s the geography of his homeplace that introduces a rare trace of doubt into his conversation. Magheralin is tight to the border with Down, and he notes that his local GAA club play in Down, but he considers himself from Armagh.
‘I think it’s very controversial,’ he says with mock seriousness.
The competition to claim him might become even more intense, as hopes grow that Wiffen (right) could be on the verge of producing a medal-winning performance at the Paris Olympics.
This is the result of his brilliant displays at the European Short Course Championships in Bucharest before Christmas, when he won three golds and splintered a world record in winning one of them, before he won two more golds at the World Championships in Doha last month.
And with his growing profile comes more attention — some of it just plain weird.
‘I’m OK with it, but I think I stopped someone following me into the toilet the other day,’ he relates with a smile.
‘They were like, “Oh, can I get a photo?” and I was like, “Yeah, but do you mind if you wait for a bit?”’
This is told through a grin. It’s a familiar pose for a young man who combines immersion in the gruelling depths of long-distance swimming, at the more challenging end of high-performance sport, with a sharp sense of humour and the capacity not to take himself too seriously.
This allows him to recall his unremarkable capacity as a junior athlete with the phenomenon he has become. ‘No, I was terrible,’ he says, when asked if he was a winner in the water from his younger days. ‘Well I can’t really say terrible, but I wasn’t a very good junior swimmer. ‘I made the European Junior Championships, it was my first competition when I was 18, so I’d say it was from then that I started making competitions. ‘But I was nowhere near, I had no national medals when I was younger. I would be in the final but not doing anything special. I think it all kicked off and seems to be linked to when I started university in Loughborough in September 2020.’ He is evidently smitten with the demanding environment at the vaunted English university, where his twin brother Nathan, also an elite swimmer, also goes.
‘I think it’s because everybody has a shared goal; I mean if you’re not an Olympian at Loughborough, it’s kind of weird, which is kind of funny to say because we don’t really have that in Ireland in the swimming programmes,’ he says.
‘When I moved over to Loughborough, I got put straight in at the deep end. I was the worst swimmer there, thrown in and racing automatically in a squad with a world champion, an Olympic champion and as soon as you get put into that environment, you kind of have to embrace it, and join in with it.
‘I think that’s what I did, and I think it kind of helped me get over all the success I’m getting now, because I’ve been training with people who’ve done it and I can look at what they’ve done.’
He laughs off the online critics and trolls who seek to undermine his success, and his attention for the next four weeks turns to an intense block of training at altitude in Arizona.
When there, he will train up to 100km a week, a prospect he describes as ‘quite fun’.
And he’s not joking this time: training is what inspires this athlete. It’s not the medals or the grand ambitions. It is, he insists, spending time with his friends through hour after hour in the pool.
‘Well my motivation I guess is different to everybody else’s, because I’m not motivated to swim because of the results that I produce in the pool or in competition, I’m doing it for the fun. I’m doing it because I actually enjoy training,’ he explains, speaking from a corporate boardroom at the PTSB offices in Dublin.
As well as the smell of chlorine, the sparkling scent of polished offices will become familiar, too, as sponsors clamour to be associated with a man who could be one of the most famous people in Ireland by the end of July. That’s not firing him, either. ‘When I turn up to training, it’s not because I want to become a world champion, it’s actually because I enjoy turning up with all my friends.
‘I train in a group of 12 who also do 1500m and 800m, and I would happily never race again and still train every day. I love it.’