As Paris 2024 beckons, Daniel Wiffen already reaching out for gold

Ninety-nine years down, one year to go! With the possible exception of your summer holiday, and of course Christmas Day, nothing celebrates the final countdown more than the Olympics. Ready or not, Paris 2024 here we come.

The Olympic Federation of Ireland is already making a big deal about that 99-year wait for Paris and there is good reason to be excited too, next year marking the centenary of our first participation as the Irish Free State – just 17 months after it was established under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1922.

There is a wonderful history of successful Irish Olympians long before that, going back to the first modern Games in Athens in 1896, where Oxford student John Pious Boland abandoned his lecture tour of Greece and won a gold medal in the men’s tennis singles and the doubles while – to his dying regret – representing Great Britain.

Then came John Flanagan and Martin Sheridan and Peter O’Connor and all the rest who won Olympic medals representing either the USA or Great Britain, while never forgetting their homeland either, and a special shout-out this weekend to the only Irish man ever to win an Olympic gold medal and an All-Ireland medal. You know who he is.

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Paris also marks a sort of homecoming, given the City of Light also hosted those 1924 Games. It is also the city’s chance for some redemption after the largely shambolic hosting in 1900 (even if the swimming events produced unusually fast times, largely explained by the fact they were held in the River Seine and swam with the current).

Given the limited preparation of our then Team Ireland, it’s no great surprise our sporting success wasn’t much to write home about: from the team of 48 athletes (46 men and two women), across five events – athletics, water polo, boxing, football and tennis – the best result was for Thurles boxer Paddy Dwyer, also known as Rocky, who settled for fourth in the welterweight division. Already exhausted, he was unable to box off the bronze.

Although we didn’t leave Paris empty-handed: beginning with the 1912 Games in Stockholm, and at the insistence of Pierre de Frédy (the modern Olympic Movement founder better known as Baron de Coubertin), medals were also awarded for works of art inspired by sport Dubbed the Pentathlon of the Muses, the competition was divided into five categories: architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture.

Of our eight artistic entries, two won medals, one with a perhaps suitably swimming theme. The year before, in 1923, Jack B Yeats, younger brother of William, witnessed the first Liffey Swim in Dublin, and beautifully captured the moment with his painting of eager spectators leaning over the river walls for a glimpse of the swimmers below. Only the triptych masterwork Etude de Sport, by the prolific Jean Jacoby from Luxembourg, denied Yeats gold.

Then in a reportedly tight race for the literature medals, poet and doctor Oliver St John Gogarty won bronze for his Ode to the Tailteann Games. First written at the request of the Irish government on the revival of those games that same year, lines such as “lips and face of blood are drained, and fainting limbs are numb” perhaps appealed to Coubertin’s love of all things muscle and mind.

Sadly, none of these get a mention in Chariots of Fire. Later, in London in 1948, Letitia Hamilton also won bronze for her painting Meath Hunt Point-to-Point Races, after which the Pentathlon of the Muses was no more.

Now, 99 years on from Paris 1924, Team Ireland medal prospects have never been greater. On Wednesday, at an event to mark 365 days to go, the Olympic Federation of Ireland reckoned we could qualify 170 athletes, in 22 sports, well up on the 116 athletes, across 19 sports, who made it to Tokyo.

Already, 43 athlete spots have been secured in equestrian, rugby, boxing, athletics and, this week, in swimming too – that event now showing the sort of medal-winning potential unprecedented in Irish Olympic history (at least anyone whose name isn’t tarnished like Michelle Smith de Bruin, after her three gold medals and a bronze in Atlanta 1996.).

Chief among them is Daniel Wiffen, just turned 22, who in one of the fastest 800m freestyle finals in swimming history on Wednesday, touched home in fourth, just half a second away from the bronze medal at the World Championships in Fukuoka, Japan. His time of 7:39.19 smashed his own Irish record by nearly five seconds, breaking the European 800m freestyle record to boot.

No Irish swimmer has ever won a medal at these long-course championships. Wiffen’s brilliant effort came just a day after Mona McSharry, also just 22, finished fifth in the 100m breaststroke, relegated from second inside the final 10m – just 0.13 of a second shy of bronze.

In Tokyo, McSharry made the final of that event too, the first Irish swimmer to make a final in any swimming event since de Bruin. Already qualified for Paris thanks to her performance in Fukuoka, the medal prospects there are now building nicely.

For Wiffen, however, now comes his main event, the 1,500m freestyle final set for lunchtime on Sunday. Fukuoka has already marked another big leap forward for the Armagh swimmer, who was introduced to the crowd at Marine Messe Hall as the “new big name in distance swimming”, and he goes into that 1500m event ranked third fastest on times to date and a real medal prospect.

Two years into a three-year science degree at Loughborough University, where he trains under Andi Manley, Wiffen’s medal progress towards Paris is reflected in the quality of swimmers that denied him a medal in the 800m; Ahmed Hafnaoui from Tunisia, the 20-year-old Olympic champion in the 400m freestyle, took gold in 7:37.00, ahead of Sam Short, the teenager from Australia, who won silver in 7:37.76 (having already won gold in the 400m freestyle). Bobby Finke from the USA, the defending and Olympic champion, was third in 7:38.67.

What is certain about Wiffen is that he’s not shy of confidence either, already talking up his world record prospects in the 1,500m, which may well be required to win the gold medal in Paris.

Sunday may or may not present further evidence of that. But just having Wiffen in the medal conversation, less than a year out, is good enough for now. Jack B Yeats saw his medal chance a year out too.