Ah, sure we can’t help ourselves, can we? In the build-up to Daniel Wiffen’s 1,500m freestyle final in the pool in Paris, those RTÉ swimming experts back in the Donnybrook studio looked as if they’d found a crystal ball that was shatterproof and all had seen the future with a “W” in it.
All of them looked presenter Darragh Moloney in the eye and didn’t blink in giving the same prediction.
“Wiffen!”
“Wiffen!”
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“Wiffen!”
“Wiffen!”
Not only did the quartet of Earl McCarthy, Gráinne Murphy, Barry Murphy and a sockless Andrew Bree all think that Wiffen would claim the gold medal to add to his 800m freestyle gold, but Bree let it slip that all four had been talking before they went live and believed that he would win in a world record time. Another “W”!
So, when Daniel came out last of the eight finalists and put his two hands together to form the letter “W”, how could we doubt the wise men and woman? It was written in the stars, surely? Wiffen. Win. World record.
Except Murphy — after claiming Wiffen was “in complete control of his own destiny” — who voiced some mild concern that maybe, just maybe, American Bobby Finke, the defending champion, might be, well, a concern.
Certainly, commentator John Kenny shared such concerns, even if his co-commentator Nick O’Hare (who, thankfully, had found his voice again after losing it last week and leaving poor JK all alone for much of the swimming events) produced another “W” into the vocabulary in predicting that Wiffen would “walk” it.
And sure hadn’t his old buddy Mark Foster — the British Olympian — told him as much when they’d met in the corridor?
Kenny, though, still wasn’t entirely convinced.
After Nick had told us that the only family member Wiffen didn’t have with him in Paris was his pet tortoise Flash, Kenny rightly reminded us that Finke would be like a “wounded animal” having already lost his 800m title to Wiffen.
“Can he double up?” asked Kenny of his sidekick.
“Definitely,” responded O’Hare, as if he too had seen the future.
The race turned into something of a procession but it wasn’t with Wiffen at the head of matters. Finke did play the part of the wounded animal in jumping into a lead that grew bigger and bigger so that the yellow line of the world record (we could see it on our TVs, the swimmers thankfully not banging their heads into the moving line) fell behind the American’s body.
O’Hare very kindly explained how the latissimus dorsi muscles in the swimmers’ bodies worked before the need to kick their feet for the extra speed in the later stages of the race. But we waited and waited for Wiffen’s famed kick. “I’m getting concerned,” said Nick as the race moved beyond the 1,000m mark. “I’d have expected him to be closer.”
JK, in fairness, held it together when it was all over. “Let’s not sniff at this folks, it’s a bronze medal,” said Kenny, paying tribute to the fact that Finke had set a new world record in winning.
And it says a lot about how expectations had reached such rare heights that there seemed to be acute disappointment in the RTÉ studio when we left Paris for Dublin.
“Did we get too carried away?” wondered Moloney, stoutly resisting any urge to remind the four swimming experts that nobody had died and surely they could cheer up a little bit. But he just left it at that.
So, had they got carried away?
“I don’t think so. I don’t think so,” insisted McCarthy.
Earlier on, Peter Collins was in the presenter’s seat when the decision was made to move the men’s tennis final between Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz from RTÉ 2 over to the RTÉ News channel so that the men’s golf tournament could be shown.
But they jinxed it.
Rory McIlroy had just had five straight birdies to move into medal position when the golf replaced the tennis. But what only went and happened? As soon as RTÉ started their golf coverage, didn’t McIlroy only go and hit his approach into the 15th green short into the water? Another “W” for the day that was in it.
“I can’t believe what I’m watching,” said commentator Tony Johnstone, not realising that his latest “W” was now part of the RTÉ playlist.
Anyway, McIlroy was most definitely jinxed and didn’t manage to recover from his double-bogey. Maybe Jon Rahm was jinxed too because his four-stroke lead disappeared and instead Johnstone could only wax lyrical about world number one Scottie Scheffler, who remembered he was playing in a tournament and shot a final round 62 to leapfrog to the top of the leaderboard.
Thankfully, RTÉ also had time to get back to the end game of the tennis for us to see Djokovic win another tiebreaker over Alcaraz, where we were informed he was just the fifth player to complete the Golden Slam (of winning the four Grand Slams and the Olympics).
No wonder he was in tears.
