There had been an e-mail sitting snug and quiet on the system for an hour or more but the five o'clock news was what ended it for them. The Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne had upheld the FINA ban on Michelle de Bruin. Kay and Al Guy came in from the twilight zone.
On Saturday, January 10th, 1998, by the time they stopped at the Kilkenny Design Centre for coffee having left the de Bruin household in Kells, they had begun to wonder if the package they were escorting would change their lives. Eighteen months later they know. From the time the Michelle de Bruin tampering story broke, Al and Kay have cocooned themselves in silence and let the bitter winds blow around them. It hasn't been easy and Kay Guy in particular felt the stress. The couple were targeted as the perceived weak link in the FINA case. As Ireland reflexively defended its golden girl, it was open season on Al and Kay Guy. They stayed stoic.
"I have friends who thought they could tot it all up and see that Michelle's career added to three golds," says Kay Guy. "That hurt sometimes. People would say everything she has ever done stacks up. What were they thinking about myself and Al in that case?"
That sense of constantly being spoken about and maligned while having no voice of their own was the most difficult to bear. One day they had a photographer camped outside their house, the picture appeared in the Irish Independent later.
"It just gave us this under-siege mentality," says Kay Guy. "He (the photographer)told my daughter that he would come back the next day, he would stay there till Saturday to get what he wanted. I mean they never rang and asked could we have a photo or said we are sending a photographer out.
"I remember one Friday listening to Mr Lennon and he kept using my name and I had this immense frustration at just not being able to answer back. That sense of powerlessness. The case had to start at A and finish at Z and we had to let it pass all the way through. But it was stressful."
At the centre of it all, keeping their counsel were a couple who have been devoting themselves to sport for as long as they can remember. When their careers as track and field athletes ended, Al and Kay Guy moved into the thankless arena of sports administration, joining the legions of volunteers who keep sport spinning.
Kay Guy can remember doing her first urine test in 1972. Twenty seven years later, she sat in a room in Lausanne and had her competence questioned for a couple of hours. She had a right to fury. Instead she felt glad.
"It was such a relief on the Monday morning in Lausanne, knowing that the truth would come out. Just the facts. That we would be able to speak at last.
"I was worried that the judgment would be fudged and I'd have to leave the island. People would have put a spin on it and we would have to been blame again."
Both Al and Kay felt a huge sense of relief when the judgement came. Some sympathy for Michelle de Bruin, but glad there had been no fudges or caveat which would draw down further criticism of them.
The likelihood of fudge in the air had diminished greatly since the word androstenodione was used in court by Dr Jordi Segura, the head of the municipal laboratory in Barcelona who had tested de Bruin's sample. The banned substance had shown up in three separate tests.
"Segura's one word was enough to send a message all through that place, you could see the panic on the other side of the fence," says Al Guy. "That one word was enough to kill it. If Peter Lennon did anything for sport, he was the ma who asked to have one of these things in public. It was the first time ever and that was a great thing. There was no filtered version. "In that respect a service was done. Maybe it didn't do him good as a person, but it did sport a lot of good to have it all on the table without editing. Just cold clinical facts and Dr Segura's considered opinion. There was no way he would have used that word if he couldn't stand over it as a scientist one hundred and twenty per cent.
"There are things which rankle, not least some of the journalism surrounding the case. You wonder if the people writing those stories even believe them, themselves," says Al Guy.
Al and Kay Guy were informed of the existence of androstenodione in the de Bruin sample last March. They know now that Peter Lennon knew about the substance for longer than that. Yet they were continually targeted as being worthy of the highest suspicion.
"He lost on Monday," says Kay Guy, "but if he had won on a technical point we would be sitting here as sitting ducks. That wasn't fair. I remember IDTM being amazed that we as testers were even identified. That is so unusual. Al has a different philosophy, he doesn't allow emotions to come into it. The kids found it hard. We have loads of friends this week you know, but it has been hard. I don't think he (Peter Lennon) kept within the boundaries."
Al Guy concurs. Although his work with the International Amateur Athletics Federation kept him away from home for large periods when the stress was at its most acute, he felt the pounding mallet of pressure from time to time.
"These is slight difference between justice and truth. You accept that. I feel sometimes he exceeded those limits. You get into this job and you expect to be kicked, but some of the attacks were very vicious. He did his job to the best of his ability. He's a tradesman though and he used the hammer."
Al Guy was right at the centre of one of the central issues of the case. Early on especially, much was made of the difference in the specific gravity readings taken by Al Guy in Kilkenny and Dr Jordi Segura in Barcelona.
It emerged in Lausanne that these reading had been taken on different instrumentation and that when Dr Segura measured the specific gravity of the B sample in Peter Lennon's presence on May 21st, 1998, using a dipstick (as Al Guy had done) he came up with an identical reading to Al Guy's.
"During the first publicised press conference, Peter Lennon made a big issue of the difference in specific gravity. That worried me. I couldn't understand it. I remember going in and getting a bottle of whiskey and doing the dipstick test again and getting 1.015 (the same reading he had got in Kilkenny). I knew that was impossible. Alcohol is always less than 1. I phoned John Whetton (an English academic who recruited the Guys for IDTM). He did the same test. Got the same result. "That answered a question. Here was something which effectively obscured the accuracy of what we got. It distorted the result on the dipstick. I got 1.015 and therefore I had no need to ask for another sample. The alcohol ensured that the sample went off. "In Lausanne I realised for the first time that for many months the other side had been aware that testing by dipstick would produce that result. Maybe I felt a little angry at that stage, yes. That song had been played continually right up to the last moment and yet they knew the facts."
The Guys don't talk about money, it isn't part of their motivation or even of interest to them. Just as well. There is no money in dope testing. Testers receive $60 per test and the per diem expenses for attending hearings is less than that. Al and Kay aren't complaining, but having come through the ordeal they have, they are beginning to wonder if sport will struggle to get people to do the job.
"Getting the treatment we have received, I don't know why anybody would do the job. Where are we going in sport? How are we going to control it? How can it be managed when the sides are so unequal?"
The focus now has to be on the greater issue. Neither Kay or Al Guy have very strong feelings about Michelle de Bruin. Their focus is on sport again.
"The bigger picture shouldn't be sidelined by personalisations," says Al Guy. "Michelle Smith is a victim of a system and should now be left in private to build a future in areas to which she appears to be well-suited."
They feel that the current system is sustained by the intense commercialisation of sport which demands more and more of performers. The old idea of sport having an ethos is disappearing as sharks, managers and agents begin to pollute the water.
Yesterday, it was back to business, helping run their daughter's busy bistro in Baggot Lane, taking several kind phonecalls and making some contact with the media.
Kay Guy rang the Irish In- dependent to complain about quotes from her appearing in Tuesday morning's paper when she hadn't spoken to anyone from the paper. She wasn't holding her breath waiting for satisfaction, but it was good to have her voice back again.
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