FROM Down’s defence to La Défense - Kevin McGuigan could never have imagined it turning out like this.
For the next few days, the Newry man’s head will be buried in numbers as he studies the training performances of the Irish swimming team, final preparations currently being fine-tuned as the Olympic Games near.
On Saturday then, it is au revoir to Dublin and bonjour to Paris – and that’s when it all starts to get a bit more serious.
The Olympic Village awaits, the magnitude of where they are and what they are doing really hitting home before the action gets under way on the morning of Saturday, July 27 at La Défense Arena in the west of the French capital.
McGuigan is Swim Ireland’s head of performance analysis, has been since late 2021 having previously worked with Sport NI. It was there that the name Daniel Wiffen first came to his attention.
“I got a feel for who was on the radar at that performance level,” he says, “but I didn’t really have any concept of who might develop into a potential Olympic finalist or anything like that.”
Wiffen went to the Tokyo Games as a relative unknown and returned empty-handed.
Three years on, after smashing an 800m freestyle world record that had stood for 15 years in December, then adding World Championship golds in Doha two months later, the Magheralin man travels to Paris as one of Ireland’s biggest medal hopes.
Rather than shy away from that expectation, the 22-year-old has embraced it. To McGuigan, and those studying the form behind the scenes, Wiffen’s rise has come as no great surprise either.
“One of the ongoing projects we have is called ‘On Track’ where we use an awful lot of data to plot athletes’ times and performances against world top 16 performances - Daniel was always right on that ‘On Track’ line.
“So while a lot of people see him coming to prominence, his trajectory pointed to him progressing to where he is now. It’s not something that has come out of the blue.
“His self-confidence is unwavering, which is something probably too many Irish athletes lack, and then when it comes to the big occasion they don’t perform because of that lack of confidence.
“I remember him, at one stage, talking about breaking a world record, a lot of people were probably taken aback by that because we were nowhere near it at that time, then he went and smashed it.
“So while it’s something different to hear from an Irish athlete, he has backed every bit of it up so far.”
It isn’t just Wiffen either. Larne’s Danielle Hill comes into the Games off the back of a European gold last month, while fellow Tokyo Olympian Mona McSharry and the rest of a 14-strong team (12 swimmers, two divers) also hope to force their way into the medal hunt.
Through the years, McGuigan has become au fait with swimming speak and all the key indicators that contribute to peak performance – enough that he could never be a fish out of water.
“You’re immersed in it every day…”
But it is his grounding in GAA - player, sport scientist with Ulster GAA, part of Paddy Tally’s Down backroom team and even now as one half of the Newry Shamrocks management team alongside DJ Kane - that has provided the bulk of his learning.
Away from the numbers game, it helps when working with elite athletes to have had a window into the highs and lows sport can bring – and Kevin McGuigan had a few of both along the way.
**********************
IT wasn’t a football house in which he grew up. No family ties, no meaningful club links but, coming of age in the early 1990s, it didn’t matter as red and black fever took hold of every corner of the county.
The All-Ireland triumphs of ‘91 and ‘94 left an indelible mark on an entire generation as the long wait for Sam finally came to an end.
“The National League final in 1990 was my first outing to Croke Park, they lost to Meath, then after that I was at nearly every game.
“1994 spoiled me a bit because you thought it was going to be a regular thing - sure we’ll see this all the time. Little did we know!”
But, like many others, McGuigan had been bitten by the bug.
He eventually got involved with Shamrocks and, after initially channelling his inner Neil Collins between the sticks for a few years – “they were struggling for a ‘keeper at U12, I ended up getting thrown in and made the mistake of doing okay” – he soon found a home at wing-back.
Strong and athletic, it wasn’t long before McGuigan received the county call, though his year at minor level is best forgotten.
“It was a disaster.
“That was during the foot and mouth outbreak, we had three weeks of training before we played Cavan – we had been totally shut down whereas they weren’t.”
At Casement Park, the Breffnimen annihilated a young Mourne side that also included future county men Dan Gordon and Peter Turley, but McGuigan still progressed to the U21s, then the seniors under Paddy O’Rourke and later the management of Ross Carr and DJ Kane.
Yet this was a tough time to be involved. Armagh and Tyrone had emerged as the new powers in Ulster football, while Down’s stars of the Nineties had exited the inter-county stage, leaving an inexperienced crew trying to plot their own course.
That’s why, although it was always McGuigan’s dream to wear red and black, the reality wasn’t what he had hoped for.
“It’s nice to have done it, but when I got there I didn’t play at the level I wanted to; I didn’t achieve what I wanted to achieve, even in terms of longevity of career at that level.
“Most people my age will tell you ‘if I knew now what I knew then’, you would make far more of a stab at it. Even just the finer details of it. I would’ve always considered myself very committed in terms of the smaller details of preparation, but when I look at it now I think I probably didn’t pay as much attention to certain aspects as I could’ve done. To be honest, I probably didn’t pay enough attention to the football part of it.
“That and, there’s absolutely no doubt about it looking back, I was a massive worrier when it came to things. Too many times on big occasions I let nerves get to me…”
Never moreso than in his last ever appearance in red and black – a 2009 All-Ireland qualifier defeat to Wexford in Croke Park.
“I was hooked at half-time, and rightly so because I’d been awful.
“There was something about that day and it completely got into my head, because no matter where I looked on the pitch, it looked and felt like I was playing uphill.
“It was summed up when I had to play a simple 10 yard fist pass up the line to Paul Murphy, no-one within 15-20 yards of him, and I managed to play it so far into the space in front of him that the ball was intercepted. Even the simplest of skills had gone.
“It was a complete head thing. Croke Park, big game… I was in because Damian Rafferty was injured, I knew the pressure was coming and that he’d be fit again soon, I just had a shocker.
“It’s a big regret because my career at county level was basically ended by that half an hour of football. It frustrates me slightly because I was better than that.
“I was only 23 then, and there were years at club level after I felt I’d done enough to warrant at least another crack, but the call never came…”
By then, though, it was already becoming a challenge to balance his new career with Ulster GAA and playing football, even with the Shamrocks. As a result, he finished up altogether at just 31.
“Once you’re trying to work in sport, it’s very difficult to still compete in it.
“You’re trying to do a lot of evening and weekend stuff work-wise, and that’s when then demands come on from football. I probably could’ve played on another couple of years, but it had probably run its course.”
McGuigan has dipped his toes in coaching, first with Forkhill ladies, followed by Killeavy under Mickey Linden then Stevie McDonnell, before a year alongside former Down team-mate Benny Coulter with Mayobridge.
Having taken a back seat, however, he was in no rush back – until DJ called.
“If it wasn’t the Shamrocks I wouldn’t be doing it,” he smiles.
“It’s hard around work commitments and time away with the swimmers, especially at the minute. But DJ was the first senior manager I had at the Shamrocks, of all the managers, he is the one I probably enjoyed playing for most.
“There was no back doors with him – if you were shit, you were shit, and you were told that. But then you knew any praise had been well earned; you knew you had done a good job.
“So it’s an interesting dynamic.”
For the next while, though, club commitments will have to be put on hold.
Yet McGuigan feels indebted to the GAA for helping him get to where he is today – about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime, at the greatest shown on earth.
“Anyone who has worked in GAA and worked across other sports, most will tell you that the level of analysis we see in GAA is far superior to what you’ll see in a lot of other sports. The cohort of people working in performance analysis in GAA is exceptional
“Performance analysis on that level is quite new to a lot of sports – swimming is slightly different in that there was an established analysis protocol already.
“With any GAA work, the vast majority of where I see gains is understanding your opposition and who you’re coming up against. In swimming, you can analyse your opposition all you want but you have absolutely no control over anything they do in a race.
“Dan [Wiffen] is with [his coach] Andi Manley in Loughborough, but you would keep in touch, if there’s anything specific they want to look at… like, one thing coming off the back of his performances at the World Championships in Doha was how his race profile compared against his race profile in Tokyo.
“He made substantial gains in all aspects, but the biggest was in around the turns. If you allow for the fact that in a 1500m race he’s got 29 turns, if he’s making gain in each one of them, it’s a substantial gain over the course of the race.
“So here’s hoping he can continue that in Paris.”
