Dedicated athlete found new gear

Michelle and Erik. Their Olympic story was extraordinary, even in an arena created for superlatives. Three gold medals in Atlanta in 1996 triggered national euphoria, provoked kind words from Bill Clinton and seized the attention of the world.

Michelle and Erik. Shift your stance and their story could change before your eyes. A physically mature swimmer guided from international mediocrity to triple gold by a drug-banned discus thrower. A secretive three-year journey which defied the laws of physiology, biomechanics and hydrodynamics.

It was the story of a woman who specialised in the backstroke and medley disciplines, a swimmer who passed under the tutelage of some of the world's best coaches in Ireland, America, Canada and Australia and yet was never spotted as a potential Olympic champion freestyler or butterflyer.

If Erik de Bruin had never been banned for drug use, had never issued a series of ambiguous statements concerning his moral stance on the issue, if he had never cloaked his training methods in total secrecy, eyebrows would still have been raised and questions would still have been asked. Swimming has never seen anything quite like Michelle Smith and Erik de Bruin.

Michelle Smith was born in December 1969, the eldest daughter of Brian and Pat Smith in Rathcoole, west county Dublin. She took to swimming at an early age, joining Coolmine swimming club before switching quickly to Kings Hospital where she was a member for all of her career before meeting Erik de Bruin.

At Kings Hospital Smith excelled, winning a place on Irish teams from her early teens onwards and using sheer hard work to overcome the challenges offered by her diminutive stature. She is 5 ft 3 ins, small for a swimmer.

By the time of the Seoul Olympics in 1988 she was practically a full-time swimmer and she postponed her Leaving Certificate for a year to concentrate on her career. Coaches in America speak of her literally turning up on their doorsteps and demanding to be coached and taught.

Her first two Olympic participations were disappointing. But her second Olympics in 1992 in Barcelona did lead to a memorable encounter. Out one day with a friend on the Irish team, Perri Williams, after both had finished competing, she met the Dutch discus thrower Erik de Bruin for the first time.

They hit it off so well that Smith surprised friends and family by abandoning a communications degree and a collegiate swimming career at Houston before Christmas of that year to move to Holland with her new boyfriend. A year later, having failed a drug test which ended his career, Erik de Bruin became Michelle Smith's professional partner also.

Rumour and controversy lapped around the couple from the time they formalised the business part of their relationship in the wake of De Bruin's ban arising from a track meet in Cologne in 1993. His eau de Cologne contained traces of three banned substances and he incurred a four-year ban from athletics, effectively ending his career.

In the aftermath, as Smith resumed competitive life in the pool, the couple's behaviour became increasingly idiosyncratic. The Irish Amateur Swimming Association recorded difficulties in contacting them following their move to Hardinxveld in Holland, yet their prominence within the sport was on the up.

Having retired after the Barcelona Olympics, applying unsuccessfully for the job of director of Irish swimming, Michelle Smith had apparently walked away from the pool deck. Yet from early 1994 onwards she produced a series of stunning results, breaking 23 Irish records inside 12 months.

She knocked 4.74 seconds off the Irish short-course record for the 200 metres individual medley in February 1994. In the four months preceding March 1994 Smith sliced 10 seconds off her best short-course time for the 400 metre IM, her specialist event. By December 1995 she had shaved an astonishing 8.6 seconds off the long-course Irish record for the event.

Never noted or rated as a freestyle swimmer, she knocked 50 seconds off the Irish 1,500 metres short-course freestyle record on a heady afternoon in Dortrecht when she actually slowed down deliberately and completed the final 200 metres on the butterfly stroke.

Having been a backstroke and medley swimmer for her entire career she took up freestyle and butterfly, the pool's two power-oriented events, and once again delivered spectacular improvements.

Swimming is the most scientifically exact of sports and at the top level research has paved the way for improvements in countless other sports. There are sound biological and physiological reasons why female swimmers are at their peak in the mid to late teen years. There are distinct ratios between the exertion of muscular power and the influence of hydrodynamics and stroke technique. Smith was rewriting the textbooks.

Her shape began to change, the curves vanishing and muscular shoulders emerging. Erik De Bruin, meanwhile, was difficult to deal with and arguments between the couple and officialdom were common.

In early 1995 Smith was forced to travel to Hong Kong on her own when the IASA refused to make the funding available for her partner and coach to travel also. Relationships with the swimming authorities which had been poor for the previous 12 months deteriorated further.

By then Irish swimming was awash with rumours about the precise reasons for Smith's rapid improvements. Speaking in the spring of 1995 she told the Sunday Tribune: "You can't go around explaining everything to every single person that you meet . . . I did find it offensive the first time I heard it and thought this is a load of rubbish. Now I think why should I really care. I know what I am doing. I know how I am training. I know how I am eating."

That summer at the World Championships in Vienna, where Smith first came to international prominence, there was an incident whereby Erik De Bruin, a drug-banned athlete himself, gained access to the competition's highly-sensitive drug testing area by means of accreditation he had managed to acquire and proceeded to file a detailed list of objections to the testing procedure.

Officials, bemused by the sight of a Belgian accredited swimmer aggressively objecting in Dutch on behalf of an Irish swimmer, grew suspicious and the top drug regulator of the world governing body, FINA, Harm Bayer (a magistrate in the real world) threatened to call the police. It took Irish officials 24 hours to smooth over the incident.

On one issue opinion in the swimming world has been unanimous. Smith was the hardest working, gutsiest swimmer most of her coaches had ever known. Testimonies from those who worked with her throughout a long career singled her out for her diligence and dedication. Later when questions would be raised about the unlikely scale of her improvements those who had seen her graft were the first to her defence. She left school for a year before the Leaving Certificate to prepare full time for the Seoul Olympics in 1988, travelling to Canada to work with the internationally respected coach Deryk Snelling.

Smith's two prolonged periods working with Snelling are key elements in interpreting her career before she met Erik de Bruin. Now back in his native England as that nation's director of swimming, Snelling trained 61 Canadian Olympians whose results included eight individual medals, 87 Canadian national championships and six world records. He achieved this through his cutting-edge technique and insistence on only working with 10 swimmers at any one time.

She also spent much time in Arizona working with Pierre LaFontaine, another Olympic swimming coach, and in the early 1990s made a prolonged trip to the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra where she was subjected to the complete range of physiological and fitness tests.

In 1991 she had enrolled at Houston University in Texas on a sports scholarship combining a communications major with a collegiate swimming career which was largely undistinguished. In two years she never won an American southwest conference championship. Nor when she left did she hold any school or conference records.

In the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona she cited back injury and finished 26th in the 400 IM competition, 35th in the 200 metre backstroke and 32nd in the 200 IM. (Her best Olympic finish before 1996 was 17th in the 200 metre backstroke in Seoul 1988).

In the wake of the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 when she won the three gold medals and a bronze, controversy appeared to take its toll on her earning potential. She left America behind her as a commercial no-go area but failed to prosper even in Ireland where she was dogged briefly by controversy over her appearance fee for opening a pool in the north of Ireland.

Relationships with some of the media were fraught. Letters threatening legal action were regularly sent by her lawyers to critical journalists in television and newspapers.

Last year she was involved in a minor car accident on a Carlow road near her home in Kilkenny. The neck injury she suffered seemed unlikely at first to prevent her from travelling to the World Championships in Perth in January this year but the injury persisted and is now the subject of a compensation case. In the end she withdrew from the Perth event at the last minute, missing another major championship.

She was at the couple's home in Kilkenny on January 8th when drug tester Al Guy and his team called, sparking the latest controversy in a turbulent career.