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With a name like Siobhan Bernadette Haughey there was bound to be a strong Irish connection, and indeed that soon revealed itself after Haughhey won a silver medal for Hong Kong in the women’s 200m freestyle final at the Tokyo Aquatics Centre on Wednesday - a first medal for the Chinese territory in Olympic swimming history.
A grand-niece of the late Charles Haughey, the former Fianna Fáil leader who served three terms as Taoiseach, the 23-year old Haughey was born in Hong Kong, her father Darach working there in banking, her mother Canjo being a native of Hong Kong.
Haughey has shown her Olympic medal-winning potential for some years, winning a gold medal in the 100 metre freestyle at the World Junior Championships back in 2013, and also competing in Rio 2016 when aged 17. She also placed fifth in the 200m freestyle at the 2017 World Championships in Budapest.
Ariarne Titmus from Australia won the gold medal here in an Olympic record time of 1:53.50, Haughey winning silver for Hong Kong with a new Asian record of 1:53.92. Penny Oleksiak from Canada won the bronze in 1:54.70.
Her older sister Aisling Haughey has also represented Hong Kong at several World Cup events, and was her first inspiration to take up the sport. Haughey has also achieved considerable swimming success at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the USA, coached by Rick Bishop, and is affectionately known as The Little Mermaid.
She learned to swim at age five at the South China Athletic Association in Hong Kong: “My parents loved swimming, and we lived in a building with a swimming pool,” she said in a 2016 interview. “On the weekends, my parents would bring me and my older sister to the pool to teach us to swim. It came to the point where they couldn’t teach my sister anything more because she wouldn’t listen to them, so they brought her to a swimming club close by. When I was younger, I really hated swimming. Different coaches told my parents I had talent and I shouldn’t give up swimming. The more I swam, the more I realised I actually liked swimming.”
On Monday, the first Olympic gold medal won by a Hong Kong athlete since the territory’s handover to China in 1997 stirred some sense of unity in a society so divided over political issues in recent years: fencing champion Edgar Cheung Ka-long became the city’s hero after his win in the foil event. The Olympic gold medal earns him various economic bonuses including from the government, which looks to use the win to bring people together.
In a rare scene in Hong Kong, the city’s major newspapers on Tuesday morning all carried the same story in the same tone, praising Cheung’s gold in the Tokyo Olympics. Siobhan Bernadette Haughey is set to make headlines there this week too.