When the photoshoot is over and Daniel Wiffen walks into the room, the first striking impression is his physique. Spidery lean lower limbs, impossibly thin waist, then this terrific upper torso which seems to sprout up in almost freakish proportion to the rest of his body.
Not quite Phelps-esque, but he’s getting there.
At age 22 he is the best freestyle distance swimmer in the world. While Wiffen takes a seat, the two gold medals he won at the World Aquatics Championships in Doha last month are placed on the table in front of him, beautifully minted with a slice of pearl quartzite from the Arabian Sea.
There’s also the golden trophy Wiffen won for best male swimmer of the championships, his 800m and then 1,500m triumphs an absolute masterclass in freestyle swimming and tactically executed without fault.
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Before Doha, no Irish swimmer had brought home a medal of any colour from these championships. While Wiffen may not look entirely comfortable walking among the shirts and ties of the PTSB Offices on St Stephen’s Green as their brand ambassador with Team Ireland ahead of the Paris Olympics in July, he has no problem whatsoever with this newfound swimming fame or attention.
“I would say that maybe my life has changed,” he starts, “but I don’t think me as a person has changed. I feel like I always wanted to be a world champion, and a world record holder, and I feel like I kind of expected it.”
When Wiffen talks, he presents a refreshingly open and bold attitude which is clearly what drives him once in the pool. Do not mistake his confidence for aloofness, and whatever gently nerdy impression he also gives in no way conceals his biting ambition to stand again on the medal podium in Paris.
“I feel like I can say every day that I want gold, it’s where you want to be. But if I come back with the bronze, I’m not going to be sad. I just want to be on the podium. But I think I’ve always had these really high goals of what I wanted to do.
“Maybe Doha makes me a bigger target, and they all want to beat me, but you’ve got to embrace it. If you’re going to be at the top, you’re going to have a target on your back, and my goal is just not to get beaten.”
Ask him about this journey, from his home village of Magheralin, on the Armagh-side of the border with Down, to his early years in swimming, where he could hardly win anything, and again it’s nothing without Wiffen telling himself he could go where no Irish swimmer had gone before.
“Yeah, I was a terrible ... 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 I started making competitions.
“But I’d 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.
“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. And when I moved over, 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, join in with it.
“My physiologist is the same, since I was 15, he also works in Loughborough and he told me that I wasn’t going to be better than nationally. Then after I broke the 800m world record I went up to him and I was like, ‘What do you think now?”
Loughborough has long been that centre of sporting excellence. Athletes Seb Coe and Paula Radcliffe went there, but Wiffen still had a lot of learning to do.
“My coach now [Andi Manley] told me my technique was horrible when I joined Loughborough. We’ve got a video from when I started, they filmed the day I started, doing my 50 freestyle, or whatever.
“If you look at that, compared to my technique now, it’s like a completely different swimmer. That’s one of the main reasons for this progression.”
His 14:34.07 for the 1,500m in Doha, the fifth fastest in history, would have won him Olympic gold in Tokyo and Rio, and while two medallists from last year’s World Championships weren’t in Doha, the defending champion didn’t even make the final.
Last July in Fukuoka, Wiffen finished fourth in both events, after which he sat down with Manley and agreed something had to change: “We had to have arguments, basically, on who was wrong and who was right, and what went wrong. We got it all out on the table and as soon as we started back training for the season, it all clicked, and it all just started building from there. And I think I was right.
“But I guess my self-belief just comes from my training, basically every person I train with has told me they’ve never seen anyone faster, never seen someone work as hard. So I’m just taking all the compliments my training partners give me, take them on board and try to perform on the day.”
Wiffen also explains his pre-race walkouts in Doha, pointing at an imaginary watch, or pretending to be dialled-in, aren’t just for show.
“No, the reason I did these walkouts is to relax myself before the race. Because you feel all these nerves coming towards the race, and if I’m constantly thinking about the race then I’m going to do something wrong. So if I change some of my mindset in the call room, ‘Okay, I have to make sure I hit this walkout right’, take it in steps towards the race and then I’ve got about three minutes before I dive in when I can start thinking about the race.”
He’s on a week-off now, his first break since last summer, and later this month will head to a four-week training camp at altitude in Arizona, swimming twice a day, every day, pushing his weekly volume up over 100km.
Inevitably, his Doha success drew some negatively suggestive comments on certain social media outlets and swimming platforms, not that Wiffen was bothered in the slightest.
“To be fair, it takes a lot for me to take what somebody says, and really affect me. The only person who can say something to affect me is my twin brother Nathan. I just take all these things with a pinch of salt, and actually use it a lot of the time as motivation.”
Wiffen talk: The double World Champion on ...
“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, enjoy turning up with all my friends, and I would happily never race again and still train every day. I love it.” The motivation to be the best swimmer in the world.
“I’ve had people jump on me before, step on me, shoulder me in the call rooms but that was when I was a bit younger, maybe people were a bit scared because they weren’t sure what I was going to do. I try to sit at the back and not looking at anyone because people always try to stare you out.” The mind games in the call room before major championships.
“It’s a massive part. I think Loughborough University do testing, and they told me I’m one of, or get the most benefit of any athlete they’ve ever seen. As in the amount of red blood cells, stuff like that.” The importance of altitude training in Arizona before Paris.
“I go to the cinema. Nathan and I go to the cinema nearly every week. Everyone in Loughborough jokes about it because I do movie reviews, well I try to do them for the university, so we go to the cinema and rate movies.” His escape away from the swimming pool.
