SO, HOW DID Ireland get so good at swimming?
It helps, obviously, to have pure talents like Mona McSharry and Daniel Wiffen.
Wiffen qualified for the Tokyo Olympics as a teenager and won Commonwealth silver a year later. McSharry was a junior world champion in 2017 and, of course, won the seventh series of Ireland’s Fittest Families.
Both have profited from working in university systems abroad. McSharry is at the University of Tennessee, where she has sharpened her elbows to become a world-class competitor.
“At Tennessee we do a lot of racing not in race suits, and the time is irrelevant,” says McSharry. “You’re just racing for points and for getting your hands on the wall, and not even just for first place. There’s points for one, two, three, so it’s just trying to beat as many people as possible and time doesn’t really matter because it’s straight finals. So that’s how I take finals now as well.”
Wiffen, meanwhile, has developed into one of the world’s best distance swimmers at the University of Loughborough, working under coach Andi Manley. On top of that extremely successful coaching relationship, Loughborough is kitted out, to put it mildly.
It is equipped with a £500,000 Kistler machine, which precisely analyses a swimmer’s performance from within the water, allowing swimmers eke out vital gains on their turns. Where other universities and professional environments have to rely on a Go Pro and a coach’s hovering eye, Loughborough’s system has 12 cameras that offer angles from underneath, above, and from the side, all displayed on a 50-inch screen beside the pool.
McSharry and Wiffen have delivered Ireland’s first two medals of the Paris Olympics, and Ireland’s first swimming medal at the Games since 1996.
Wiffen is certainly not going to stop: he swims in the 1500m this weekend, where the doubt around a medal is limited only to its colour.
But look beyond the glitter of the medals and the fundamentals are strong. Ireland sent 12 swimmers to Paris, their biggest-ever team. From Sydney 2000 to Rio 2016, 16 Irish swimmers competed across 33 events and all but two of them were eliminated in their heats. Andrew Bree (2008) and Shane Ryan (2016) each made semi-finals, but got no further.
McSharry, however, snapped the run when she made the final of the 100m breaststroke in Tokyo. “We said that 2020 would be the feeler Olympics,” said McSharry on Monday night, “and 2024 would be where we get stuff done.”
That wasn’t just limited to McSharry. Danielle Hill finished 25th and missed out on a semi-final in the 100m backstroke three years ago: in Paris she made the semis and ranked 16th.
Ellen Walshe was knocked out in the heats of the 100m butterfly and 200m medley in Tokyo, but qualified for the final of the 400m medley in Pars, finishing eighth overall.
Ireland have had one relay team compete at the Olympics since the turn of the century, and that was in Tokyo. They have three relay teams in Paris.
And so where Ireland had just a single Olympic swimming final since 1996, they have had three already in Paris, and Wiffen alone will ensure it won’t stop there.
“For all the people sat at a desk, or on a pool deck or in a gym somewhere doing their little bit to see this progress, the last 48 hours is because of all of that, as well as supremely talented athletes who are all hitting their best days at the right time,” says Swim Ireland’s high performance director Jon Rudd. “I couldn’t be more happy.”
That Irish swimmers are hitting their best days at the right time is a result of his work. The gain has come after some pain. Whereas athletes from other countries can earn Olympic qualification by meeting the required race time at any race at any time, Rudd was determined to create a system in which the swimmers had to deliver at a specific moment.
Irish swimmers, therefore, were only considered for Olympic selection if they met the standard time at one of just three events: the 2023 World Championships, the 2024 World Championships, and the Irish Open.
“It was tough at first as athletes and coaches got it wrong, but you have to learn,” says Rudd. “We have to know how to deliver in the moment at an Olympic Games. It’s no good Daniel Wiffen breaking a world record in a couple of weeks’ time. It would be nice, but frustrating, right? You have to create a system domestically so that everyone understands, ‘there are the five, six, seven days in which I have to perform.’”
Rudd also increased exposure to international competition, and Ireland are now competing against a higher standard of opposition more regularly. They have also been creative in addressing a problem for those falling through the cracks.
For swimmers aged 18 or 19 just out of the junior international ranks but not yet ready to qualify for senior international events, Swim Ireland introduced a lower and more forgiving qualifying standard to allow them get exposure and experience of major events.
Ireland also hosted the inaugural European U23 championships in August of last year, where they topped the medal table. (McSharry won a trio of gold medals, while Wiffen won gold at 1500m and silver in the 800m and 400m.)
“We have raced abroad in hotbeds of international swimming for six years and at first some of the athletes struggled, and couldn’t get out of their heats”, says Rudd. “But then they are in semi-finals. Then they are in finals. Then they are no longer in outside lanes.
“Psychologically they become more resilient and feel part of the fabric of international swimming. Walk into an environment like this and you’ll never feel comfortable, but you will feel more comfortable.”
There have been broader changes that may soon trickle through to the Olympic Games. Rudd has led an alignment of the calendar and competition across all four provinces. Now their championships must all be held with a week of each other, whereas previously things were much looser. This is all with a view to feeding into the national championships, which have been tweaked too. Whereas previously all age-groups at Division One level were held across one weekend with Division Two held a week or two later, now the calendar split is by age-grade, rather than by division.
This carries somewhat of an incentive to move through divisions, but it primarily gives clarity and certainty to swimmers, coaches, clubs and families about when they will be competing and for what they must be aiming. This has general benefits, such as allowing families make their holiday plans, but it is part of the same principle as Ireland’s Olympians have been governed: everyone knows the week for which they must peak.
Rudd has effected a general alignment across the four provinces, whereby classes and competitions are the same, even down to their names.
“That was a big piece for us, getting all four provinces doing the same thing at the same time and call it the same stuff,” says Rudd. “Now if you’re a 12-year-old kid in Munster and if your parents get a job in Leinster or Ulster and you move there, you can carry on swimming and it kind of looks the same. Competitions are at the same time with the same sort of structure, same sort of pools. That all funnels into a national system that people now understand.”
There are other talents blossoming too, including Daniel’s twin brother Nathan, European junior gold medalist John Shortt, and Ellie McCartney, who joined Ellen Walshe in making the final of the European Short Course Championships last year.
But Swim Ireland are still working with substandard facilities. Three of the four provincial centres have 50m pools – UL in Munster, Dublin’s Aquatic Centre in Leinster, and Bangor in Ulster – but there is no equivalent in Connacht. Building one would be a great legacy of McSharry’s success.
“The rural nature of Ireland always makes it a challenge for talented kids to find a swimming pool”, says Rudd. “That law says the most talented person is the one that’s 40 or 50 miles away from a pool. Those are the challenges you have to overcome.
“You need a swimming pool in every reasonably sized conurbation on the island, right? 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. It is an essential.
“We’ve got a lot of towns and areas with a reasonable size of 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.”
Nothing amplifies a case like Olympic success.
