The Olympic Federation of Ireland has announced the 12 swimmers who will compete for Team Ireland at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris – not only the largest ever Olympic swimming and aquatics team for Ireland, but the strongest and most competitive ever fielded in an Olympic arena.
Spearheaded by World Champion and World Record holder Daniel Wiffen, the swimming team comprises of six male and six female athletes who will feature in ten individual events and three relay events across the course of the nine days of competition, with racing commencing on the 27th July and running through to the 4th August.
Daniel Wiffen will compete in his favoured 800m and 1500m Freestyle events in Paris, the two distances in which he took the world by storm, becoming a double World Champion only five months ago. With both European and World records to his name, the Magheralin native leads the prospects for Team Ireland aquatics in Paris. Not satisfied with only competing in the first week of the Games, Wiffen will remain as part of the team through to the end of the second week, where the nation will be enthralled to see him compete in the Open Water 10km Marathon Swimming event down the River Seine on August 9th – another first for Irish Olympic swimming.
Team Ireland’s challenge in the women’s events will be equally prominent when second-time Olympians Mona McSharry, Danielle Hill and Ellen Walshe all take to the stage. McSharry is no stranger to Olympic Finals, having featured in the pinnacle round of the 100m Breaststroke in Tokyo last time of asking. Her most recent form in both the 100m and 200m events suggest that she can at least match this achievement again. Having been agonisingly close to medals at the 2023 and 2024 World Aquatics Championships in Fukuoka and Doha respectively, Sligo’s McSharry will be striving to do all she can to ensure that she is in the hunt for hardware on French soil.
Training out of Larne, Danielle Hill will arrive at the Games as a current and very recent European Champion, as well as being a silver medallist at the June iteration of the European Aquatics Championships in her premier event, the 100m Backstroke. Hill has delivered at every opportunity through 2024 and her excellent form will see her as a strong contender in both the 100m Backstroke and the 50m Freestyle events in Paris, with current world rankings indicating that semi-final and final appearances can be the order of the day for the fastest female swimmer that Ireland have ever produced.
In Templeogue’s Ellen Walshe, Ireland have one of the most consistent and driven performers in worldwide Medley swimming. Competing in both the 200m and 400m IM events, Walshe’s strongest chance of featuring in a final seems to sit with the 400m version, whilst her experience as a 200m World semi-finalist in February will hold her in great stead across both distances. With a 100m Butterfly appearance set to kick-start her Olympic campaign, a second Olympic Games for Walshe has been on the cards since she first qualified back in July 2023.
Strong interest in Team Ireland’s Women will not stop here as a world-class 400m Medley relay will take to the stage on Day 8 of the Games, and with Hill, McSharry and Walshe taking on the first three legs of this relay, they will be backed up by a Freestyle athlete who will be determined following the Women’s 400m Freestyle relay challenge on Day 1. Hill will once again feature in this relay, with Erin Riordan, Grace Davison and Victoria Catterson all making their Olympic debuts as part of another strong team for Ireland. At only 16 years of age, Davison is the youngest member of the Team Ireland contingent, across all sports.
In the Men’s events, Tom Fannon will compete in the 50m Freestyle on Day 6 in what will be a stacked field of the world’s fastest pool-based athletes. The former European Junior champion swims in the event which takes less than 22 seconds to complete and where attention to detail is imperative. As with all swimming events, but most acute here, a mere hundredth of a second can make all the difference and Fannon will be focused on his sole outing at the Games in an endeavour to progress through the quickfire rounds.
Four very well-known names in Irish swimming will have one key focus and one focus only when Games time comes around; on Day 8, the Men’s 400m Medley relay of Conor Ferguson, Darragh Greene, Max McCusker and Shane Ryan will all enter the field in an attempt to replicate their swim which saw them feature in the World Championships Final back in February. For Ryan, this is his third Games, and he becomes the first male Irish swimmer to achieve this, whilst for Green it his second, and this combined experience will spur on Olympic debutants Ferguson and McCusker. With all four athletes having the single focus, to deliver as part of a relay within which they have all featured together on several occasions before, the final 48 hours of 2024 Olympic swimming will be extra special for Irish sports fans as both male and female versions of this relay compete on the same day.
Jon Rudd, Team Leader for the aquatics section of Team Ireland was to say, “The largest team and the most competitive team ever, says it all. These athletes have been progressing, gaining confidence and delivering in key moments ever since we said farewell to Tokyo. We have numerous athletes here that sit amongst the very best in their events on a worldwide basis and there isn’t a swimming or a diving day that anyone can afford to miss. Our individual event athletes are all high performers in the truest sense and our three relays are at full strength. It’s a real pleasure to be able to name twelve swimmers to this team and to also add Ciara to the diving team alongside Jake. There’s talent, ambition and dedication across all of those that will be on the plane with us and we have an excellent team of staff to support them through the Holding Camp which starts on the 16th July, through to the competition days themselves. We know that the island of Ireland will all be behind us – and that spurs us on even more.”
