It was meant to be a relaxed swim, nothing timed. But then Wiffen asked Rudd to time him doing a 100m and he clocked a time faster than he thought.
“[Daniel] gracefully slid up and down the pool in a ridiculously fast time for someone who looked like they were doing nothing,” recalls Rudd, who joined Swim Ireland in late 2016.
“The good ones sometimes need that extra little thing to tell them, ‘I’m ready to go now’.”
The last few days have been Irish swimming’s nirvana. Mona McSharry started it with her bronze on Monday in the 100m breaststroke and Wiffen followed it with his gold in the 800m freestyle on Tuesday night.
There was also Ellen Walshe becoming just the third Irish swimmer to compete in an Olympic final with her 400m individual medley on Monday night.
“This is a new generation. They walk tall, heads high. You walk into a swimming venue now with Ireland written on you and people will go, ‘Well, there’s Ireland’.
“And not so long ago we would have been sat in the corner and hopeful that we just crept into a semi-final.
“It’s this crop of athletes that have done that.”
There’s the obvious shadow of Michelle Smith over Irish swimming. Twenty years ago, Ireland only had two swimmers at Athens 2004, and neither went beyond the heats.
Here in Paris, they have their largest team (12 swimmers, two divers). But there’s been nothing fast about this success, according to Rudd.
“It’s only an overnight success if you’re the person who flicks on the Olympic Games once every four years and goes, ‘Look, there’s some swimmers winning medals’.
“Mona McSharry is a junior world champion from 2017. Daniel Wiffen was a [double] world champion earlier this year.
“It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that he does well at an Olympic Games later in the same year.
“It’s not an overnight success, it bubbles away gently in the background and then, boom, every four years the whole world gets to see it.
“I hope in six weeks and six months people are still talking about it and are still inspired by it.”
And to a topic that never leaves Irish sport: facilities. There are six 50-metre pools on the island of Ireland. When Swim Ireland’s new strategic plan is released in a few months, infrastructure will be part of the strategy for the first time.
“We’ve got a lot of towns and areas with a reasonably sized population where it is too far to travel to get a warm swimming pool in the winter months. Swimming in an outdoor lake or river is just not feasible.
“Where that comes from is a multi-responsibility,” Rudd adds.
“There are all sorts of agencies that need to work on that and we can have an influence on it, but we don’t own swimming.
“We absolutely state our case, but we need to win the hearts and minds of those that make the decisions.”
Irish swimming: ready to go.
