A tough customer, still playing hardball

For so long, the diplomatic silence held by one side of the Michelle de Bruin case created a void so plentifully filled by Peter Lennon's voice that it came as something of a surprise last week to hear that there was another side to the story.

Faced with a domesticated media which have largely displayed an innocent trust which would be charming in puppy dogs and small children, Mr Lennon has for a year skilfully controlled the terms of the debate about his client. De Bruin never took drugs, the world was filled with envious people who wanted to get her, the same people had got her husband, these people were dangerous and incompetent. Any loose talk and Mr Lennon would, as one of de Bruin's media lackeys once put it, "see you in court, boys".

Last week in Lausanne's Royal Savoy Hotel, at the first public hearing of an appeal by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), we reached endgame. Dr Jordi Segura, head of the Olympic-accredited laboratory in Barcelona, sat down, fixed his spectacles on his nose and prepared to take cross-examination from Mr Jean-Pierre Morand, lawyer for FINA, swimming's international governing body.

The de Bruin legal team, appealing against her four-year ban for sample-tampering, suddenly moved as excitedly as cartoon characters who have just had one of those spherical bombs with the sparkling fuse presented to them. Mr Lennon objected. Argument on the objection lasted an hour before the court decided to take the matter on reserve.

Mr Morand proceeded. For the first time in public it would be confirmed that Michelle de Bruin had taken banned substances, that the substance, androstenedione, was synonymous with the old East Germany. The concentration of androstenedione found in the sample from January 10th, 1998, suggested that the drug had been administered 10 to 12 hours before the test took place. Et voila, said FINA - motive.

Suddenly it seemed to matter less whether CAS felt obliged to walk towards any of the legal loopholes through which Mr Lennon was attempting to usher it. No acquittal would wash away Dr Segura's testimony.

The strategy of opting for a public hearing seemed most baffling at that moment. "Peter, when you begged us to have this in public, you knew what was coming down the pipelines," Mr Morand said sweetly as he twisted the knife. Minutes later Dr Segura was weathering Mr Lennon's outrage as he calmly insisted he had attempted to show the lawyer de Bruin's steroid profiles in his laboratory when he attended on May 21st, 1998. "Tell him that is a lie," Mr Lennon said to Dr Segura's interpreter.

"He says `no, it is the truth'," replied the interpreter seconds later. Of the blows which the de Bruin case suffered in the court, Dr Segura's evidence was by far the most telling.

Much has been made by the swimmer's media fan club (already talking of kangaroo courts), of the fact that Dr David Browne, the English scientist who claimed to have found a method of breaching the Versapak kits used in the test, was not allowed to give evidence.

Little significance can be attached to this. FINA's doping panel had already accepted the theoretical possibility that the containers could be breached. CAS accepted this too and, with the agreement of the de Bruin legal team, commissioned an independent forensic study to examine whether the canisters A07 4396 and B074396 had been so breached.

The team from the University of Lausanne found a very high probability that the relevant canisters hadn't been tampered with.

This evidence was buttressed in written testimony by a report from the Amoco oil company which had established that even use of boiling water needed some force to remove the top from the canisters. The distortion to the polymers and the coloration is always visible (sometimes only under microscope) even after reforming the deformed material by re-immersion in boiling water.

Dr Browne, who had been on the list of witnesses to be called until April 14th when his name was withdrawn, could bring no specific information to bear on the two de Bruin canisters, as he had not examined them.

Furthermore, as was pointed out in court, rather than functioning with any degree of independence, Dr Browne (to the visible irritation of the judges) was out of his seat perhaps 20 times a day passing notes to Mr Lennon and his assistants and acting as a fully integrated member of their legal team.

Despite Dr Browne having caused a media ripple in February with his experiment, no written report from him was available to be entered into evidence.

The rest of the hearing was distinguished by two contrasting strategies. Mr Lennon marshalled battalions of details as he looked for a fissure in the FINA case. Mr Morand said motive and opportunity pointed in only one direction. Mr Lennon's attack centred on rule-books and doping-control forms. FINA had no technical or legal right to test his client, it was applying the wrong rules. His client said it took her three tranches of urine to come up with the required 70 ml. Al and Kay Guy, the sampling officers, insisted it was two. De Bruin's copy of the doping control form had not got the finishing time of the test filled in. He appeared to have made little progress with his bruising examinations of the Guys. Their generosity in refusing to mark de Bru in down for a no-show when she missed a test two days before seemed to reduce the likelihood of them ever having been the villains.

Mr Lennon was more successful in cross-examining representatives from Versapak and International Doping Tests and Management, both of which appeared to have been worryingly casual about withdrawing the old dope-testing kits or augmenting their security when they heard they were breachable. Whether that was enough to offset the evidence of Ms Monica Bonfanti of the University of Lausanne concerning the particular canisters used in the case remains to be seen.

Mr Morand worked with bolder colours. The whiskey was smelt in the house and the lab. The dipstick measure of specific gravity was the same in the house and the lab. The swimmer was out of sight of the testers for some time. Need he mention the East German testosterone precursor?

This was listened to attentively by Yves Fortier, Denis Oswald and Michael Beloff, three accomplished legal minds. On the face of it, the selection of the three-man judging panel from a list of 150 lawyers does not appear to have worked out too favourably for the de Bruin team. Mr Oswald, the FINA nominee, was a member of the panel which last year rejected the appeals of three athletes who had tested positive for metandienone, FINA's first success at CAS. Mr Beloff, the nominee of the de Bruin team, was a member of the ad-hoc CAS panel in Atlanta and, in a subsequent report in the Sport and Law Journal, had made kind mention of her. Last week, though, it was the questions from the Oxford don which most frequently cut to the heart of the matter. Mr Beloff's polite but piercing interventions on possible FINA bias, the Segura evidence and the Dr Browne preclusion, all helped to steer the panel in a manner which might not have been expected.

Whether de Bruin's career is salvaged by the decision it reaches in the next few weeks scarcely matters, her reputation has sunk below the plimsoll line of credibility.

The curt, spikily unhelpful answers she gave under cross-examination will have had little impact on the technical arguments which followed, but will serve as an enduring memory of just how hard she has played the game these past four years.

CAS has never seen a tougher customer.