Co Down swimmer Daniel Wiffen has become the first person from NI to win an Olympic gold medal since 1988.
The 23-year-old Team Ireland athlete from Magheralin won 800m freestyle race in Paris on Tuesday night.
The Olympian went into the race as the world record holder and was widely tipped as one of the country’s greatest gold medal hopes at the games.
It’s the first time that anyone from Northern Ireland has stood at the top of the podium since 1988 when hockey greats Stephen Martin and Jimmy Kirkwood were part of the victorious Great British squad in Seoul.
Before that it was Lady Mary Peters who won Britain’s only athletics gold at the 1972 Munich Olympics after winning the pentathlon competition – it was decided on the final 200m event with the then 33-year-old claiming the title by one-tenth of a second.
Wiffen ended 2023 on a high with the fastest ever 800m freestyle time at the European Short Course Championships back in December.
He also secured 400m and 1500m Short Course titles after narrowly missing out on a medal at the World Championships last summer despite repeatedly beating his own Irish records at 800m and 1500m.
The world champion almost set an Olympic record as he qualified for tonight’s event finishing in 7:41:53 on Monday, just a quarter of a second off Mykhailo Romanchuk’s Olympic record set in Tokyo.
In a big surprise the Ukrainian failed to qualify for the final alongside Australia’s Sam Short.