"Plenty more in the tank" for Daniel Wiffen after he seals 2024 Olympic qualification

The 22-year-old, who won 1500m silver at the 2022 Commonwealth Games, broke his own Irish record with a time of 7:43.81 at the event in Fukuoka.

Training at Loughborough University, Wiffen also holds the European 800m record and saw off competition from American swimmer Bobby Finke to qualify for Wednesday’s final with the fourth fastest time behind Samuel Short (Australia), Ahmed Hafnaoui (Tunisia) and Lukas Märtens (Germany).

The Paris Olympics next year will mark Wiffen’s second appearance at the biggest event in sports after the Magheralin native also represented Ireland in the men's 800m and 1500m events at Tokyo 2020.

He finished 14th and 20th respectively but will head to France next year with much higher medal hopes.

"It feels great, that's the number one job done which was to qualify for the Olympics and then to make my way through to the final, so I've done both and it was a great race," he told BBC Sport NI after becoming only the fourth Irish swimmer to make a World Long Course Championship final. "My plan going in was to be as easy as possible.

"I was maybe hoping for a tiny bit faster, but it wasn't too taxing on the body. I didn't go to my legs at all, I just wanted to win the race, so I sped up a little but there's plenty more in the tank."

Elsewhere, Ireland’s Mona McSherry finished fifth in the women's 100m breaststroke final, narrowly losing out on a medal in the last few metres of a hotly-contested race.

The Sligo swimmer had set a new Irish record of 1:05:55 in the heats and was just marginly slower in the semi-finals, but couldn’t replicate that time to finish in the medals.

Lithuania’s Rūta Meilutytė stormed to gold with the podium being made up of Tatjana Schoenmaker from South Africa and America’s Lydia Jacoby.

McSharry’s effort was enough to book her spot at the 2024 Olympics alongside 200m individual medley record-breaker Ellen Walshe.