Daniel Wiffen reveals plan to train at US college with twin Nathan after serious health struggles
NEXT STROKE Daniel Wiffen reveals plan to train at US college with twin Nathan after serious health struggles
DANIEL Wiffen will be heading stateside in September as he tags along with twin Nathan who will be starting a scholarship at the University of California.
Daniel's swim career is somewhat in flux at the moment after finishing up at Loughborough University where he recently graduated with a degree in computer science.
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Daniel won a gold and bronze medal at the Paris Olympics
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He gassed out at July's World Aquatics Championships due to suffering from appendicitis
He's now turning professional and had the option to remain at the Leicestershire college.
But despite still being on very good terms with his coach there, he feels it's time for a change in order to ensure his training remains as challenging as possible.
Nathan is in the same boat/pool but has clarified his next step by securing a scholarship to be part of the swim team at Berkeley on the US' west coast.
The pair appeared on Off the Ball on Monday and laid out how they'll be flying out to the United States once they finish up a golfing tour of Ireland.
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The Olympic 800m champion is currently taking it easy following a disappointing World Championships where his efforts were severely hampered by an ongoing case of appendicitis.
Daniel shared that he actually still hasn't had his appendix as he's delayed the operation by a couple of weeks in order to go on holiday before September comes.
During the free-wheeling feature interview, the twins expressed their excitement at the prospect of training with what they consider to be the second-best squad in the world.
They acknowledged that the University of Florida's swim team is probably superior since it contains Wiffen's 1500m foe Bobby Finke and all-conquering legend Katie Ledecky amongst others.
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But Daniel explained why he wouldn't prefer to train in the Sunshine State with a view towards the next Olympics in 2028 where he'll be targeting three gold medals in Los Angeles.
He outlined: "I don't really want to train with my direct rivals to be honest.
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"I don't want to train with them because I think you can be too friendly with your rivals.
"I train with other 1500m swimmers but they were never at my level. Or if they were like Felix (Auböck), I could try and chase him because I was a lot younger then.
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"For now I like to train with people who can push me in different ways. Like, realistically I doubt even my rivals would be able to push me on the heart-rate side of swimming long reps.
"But on the race pace side of things - which I am quite weak at - I'll have 400m freestylers to push me in California.
"So that's what I was more looking for, people who are a bit more sprinty. So when I train with them they'll push me in different ways."
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Furthermore, the 24-year-old predicted that there'll probably be a personality clash with so many stars crammed into the one team at Florida.
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He added: "I'm telling you now, it won't last. Something will happen because you can never put that many personalities in one pool.
"Somebody's going to clash with someone else or someone will have a bad set some day and snap.
"Even when Nathan and I are training (we snap at each other) and we're brothers - but obviously we can patch things up a lot easier."
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