Former Irish Olympian sees two Irish swimmers making Paris Olympics finals

“It’s a very exciting Olympics, from an Irish perspective," says RTE commentator Nick O'Hare

By: irishmirror.ie

Jul 17 2024
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Former Irish Olympian sees two

RTE commentator Nick O'Hare will be the voice behind the microphone at the 2024 Olympics. Irish swimming is booming, insists the 1996 Olympian and there are two likely finalists in the team.

“It’s a very exciting Olympics, from an Irish perspective you’ve got Daniel Wiffen and Mona McSharry, they are probably the two most likely to make finals,” says O’Hare. “Mona will find it tough to medal, she got fourth at the worlds but the two Americans were missing.

"Daniel will swim the 800 and 1500. He’s a world champion in both, he’s the world record short course holder, he broke that in Romania in December.

“That was the longest standing male world record in the books and the previous holder was a guy called Grant Hackett who’s an absolute legend, a distance swimmer from Australia.”

50-metre freestyler O'Hare began breaking Irish swimming records in the early-90's and had attended the Swimming World Cup in 1995 before making the 1996 Games where he finished 27th of 96 swimmers in his event.

“I’d always say I didn’t swim as well as I wanted to in ’96,” admits O’Hare who, these days, gets his sport 'fix' playing golf off an 0.6 handicap out of Straffan GC and who was speaking on the Golf Ireland site.

“I wasn’t talented, like if you rank talent on a scale of zero to ten in terms of world class I was probably four but I worked harder than anybody else. The thing about it is you have to love hurting yourself.

“You get addicted to the pain and I just had a go and worked harder than anybody else and put myself through pain.

"I’d vomit three times a week. I didn’t have a good week if I didn’t vomit two or three times a week.”

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