Sam Maguire on Sunday, an Olympic gold medal on Tuesday, they’ll be worn out from the celebrating in Armagh. “Are you sensing a momentous night in Irish sporting history,” Joanne Cantwell had asked Gráinne Murphy. “I …… think so,” she replied, with a small bit of trepidation, no more than ourselves gripped by our national inclination to resist losing the run of ourselves.
But as it proved it was indeed a momentous – and very golden – night in Irish sporting history.
O’Connell, O’Donnell and now Wiffen, our history is peppered with high-achieving Daniels, but with all due respect to The Liberator and the Wee fella from Kincasslagh, they never blew seven opponents out of an Olympic swimming pool.
In fairness to Andrew Bree, he had a notion Wiffen would do just that. “He will absolutely relish the moment, this is like Russell Crowe walking into the stadium, Gladiator style. ‘Are you not entertained?’”
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We were. But as Andrew put it after, “I nearly passed out – thanks Mr Wiffen.” Did you ever see a race like it?
John Kenny warned us from the off not to panic if Wiffen started at a leisurely-ish pace, that he’d rev it up as the race progressed, but then Elijah Winnington and Ahmed Jaqouadi took off like trains leaving our lad in third, a position he lost when Sven Schwarz overtook him. Panic? Too right.
”He hasn’t gone to the legs, it’s all about the arms,” John told us, at which point the nation was hollering “GO TO THE LEGS” at their telly screens, and he must have heard our sage advice, because by the halfway point he was in the lead.
“DON’T DISCOUNT PALTRINIERI,” John howled, which was daft because the Italian was nowhere to be seen. And then he tried to multiply our heebie-jeebies by pointing out that “FINKE IS A DANGEROUS LAST 100m SWIMMER!” Nuts, he was closer to drowning than competing for a medal.
And then Paltrinieri took the lead and Finke was threatening to deny Wiffen even a silver.
Thereafter. He’s some boy, this lad. He waltzed in to the arena like he was heading for a stroll in the local park, his twin Nathan reassuring Clare MacNamara pre-race that he’d be completely chilled about it all. They are, incidentally, the most identical twins known to man, calling to mind their appearance on The Late Late Show a while back. “For all you know, I’m actually Nathan,” Daniel said to Patrick Kielty. Which would have led you to wondering was that Nathan in the pool and Daniel cheering him on from the stands.
Those last couple of pool lengths? Epic is too light a word, Wiffen’s efforts belonging to the ages, utterly magnificent.
“What did we just witness,” asked Joanne, Gráinne laughing at the spectacle she had just witnessed, in an entirely disbelieving kind of way, Andrew with his head in his hands. “What’s going on,” he asked, Joanne revealing that he spent the concluding spell of the race slapping his legs and Gráinne’s.
He thought the gold was gone. “But then with about 125 to go, he bounces off the wall, ba ba ba ba, see ya!” Which was a perfect summary of how it all ended, really. “It was,” said Gráinne,” a perfect race”, although our heart rate monitors might beg to differ.
When Wiffen spoke to RTÉ immediately after the race there wasn’t a bother on him, like he never had a moment’s doubt that he could do what he just did. “Now I can say I’m one of the best ever,” he said with the gentlest of smiles.
“Even the make-up artist upstairs said I’ve never met a more confident person in my life,” Andrew laughed.
Medal ceremony time. We don’t get to hear Amhrán na bhFiann a whole lot at these Olympic occasions, so John was entirely lying when he said “you’re crying, I’m not crying”. The bulk of us, you’d guess, were in floods. Even the Wiffen man. He might have entered that pool knowing he would win, but the realisation that he’d done just that left him in tears. Magical.
