Ireland’s Wiffen twins, Daniel Wiffen and Nathan Wiffen, published a video to their “Wiffen Twins” YouTube channel today, wherein they watched and discussed Daniel’s gold medal performance in the 800 free at the World Championships in Doha earlier this year. The swim marked Daniel’s first world title, and in the video, he takes the audience through his plans, what he was thinking at various points in the race, and some stroke analysis.
Here is the video:
The video starts with Wiffen talking about how he knew the race was likely going to come from the outside lanes, which featured Australia’s Elijah Winnington and Italy’s Gregorio Paltrinieri. Winnington takes the race out fast, and Wiffen remarks that he was anticipating that to be the case. “My goal here is to sit back relax. Play my own race.”
As the race reaches the 250m mark, Wiffen notes that Winnington is still far ahead and Paltrinieri has started to create a gap. At that point, Wiffen reveals that his plan going in was to catch Winnington by the 300m turn. “As you can see, that didn’t happen.” In a look into the mind of a world champion distance swimmer, Wiffen says that he reevaluated at that point and determined he just needed to catch Winnington with at least 200m left in the race.
Right around the 525m mark, Wiffen began to inch ahead of Winnington, though, Paltrinieri had pulled into the lead by that point. “My next goal is to go get Paltrinieri.” He would pull even with Paltrinieri at the 700m turn, at which point he says “I knew that I had already won.”
Wiffen also talks quite a bit about his technique, how he’s always working on it, and how he even changed up freestyle techniques in his races at Worlds. He talks on how he feels he’s working a good DPS (distance per stroke) in the middle section of the race, juxtaposing his stroke rate with Paltrinieri’s who is taking many more strokes per lap than Wiffen was.
Wiffen really gets into his technique as he watches himself push off for the final 50m. “My technique is absolutely, well I can’t say it for the YouTube viewers, but it’s terrible.” He talks about going into an all-out sprint and his technique completely flying out the window. “What the [expletive] is this?,” Nathan asked while watching the final 50. “You look like a learn to swim child.” Daniel replies, “it doesn’t matter because it was faster.”