Theories abound but facts remain

Back in the days of national giddiness, when Michelle de Bruin came home from Atlanta, there were whimsical suggestions that Hollywood was going to make a movie about the golden couple. Nicole Kidman would play Michelle. Tom Cruise would play Erik.

All is changed utterly. When the current saga finally stops unravelling, enough conspiracy theories will have been juggled in the air to make the project of little interest to anyone but Oliver Stone.

The other day, on an airplane, I overheard a discussion on her case.

"It could just be a vendetta, couldn't it?"

"Probably."

The passengers weren't the first or the last to run with this particular notion. They had been reading stories printed that day to the effect that Michelle de Bruin's solicitor will be suing the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as part of a heavy case list.

This sits neatly with a report contained several weeks ago in a Sunday paper which claimed to have spoken with three (unnamed) sources in the IOC who stated that the IOC was "out to get" the Irish swimmer. The three sources (high enough to be privy to this startling secret but not brave enough to disclose it to anybody except a reporter from Ireland on Sunday) said the IOC had been out to get Michelle de Bruin because she was trained by Erik de Bruin.

What an appalling vista! The IOC, which happily hung an Olympic medal on the neck of formerly banned shot putter Randy Barnes in Atlanta, is out to get the wife of Erik de Bruin, who finished ninth the last time he competed in an Olympic celebration back in 1988.

Can this be the same IOC which in Atlanta overturned FINA's decision that Michelle Smith (as she was then) could not compete in the 400 metres freestyle? The swimmer had faxed the Irish Amateur Swimming Association (IASA) close to midnight on July 7th that year asking to be entered in the 400 metres freestyle following a sensational swim in Florida that day.

The IASA, whose offer of life membership Michelle de Bruin would later decline, went ahead with the entry although it was late and meant bumping the daughter of Olympic coach Bobby Madine out of the event she had been training for for two years.

There is an extraordinary web of circumstances being alleged here. The IASA and the IOC have been out to get the swimmer apparently, bringing her down through a series of judicious leaks.

So, too, have the notoriously anti-Irish citizens of the USA been stirring it. The seeds of this trouble were sown by Janet Evans when she responded to a straight question with a straight answer.

The entire business began with an American vendetta because they were so bitter about having only their most successful women's swimming Olympics in two decades. Amy Van Dyken, Brooke Bennet and Beth Botsford won individual golds, and the Americans swept the relay events. Plenty to be bitter about.

There may, of course, have also been a conspiracy which involved one or all of the following: FINA, a prestigious laboratory in Spain and a couple of decent Irish people employed by a Swedish testing agency.

ALL OF this uncannily mirrors the case of Erik de Bruin, who tested positive at an athletics meeting in Cologne on August 1st, 1993.

The Erik De Bruin case was, of course, a German plot to stop Holland's top thrower going to the World championships that summer and beating the Germans for the top spots. German plots against the Dutch plays very well with the public in Holland.

De Bruin saw conspiracies everywhere. He claimed that the organisers of the meet in Cologne had decided beforehand that he was to be "randomly" tested; that the German drug scientist Manfred Donike was conducting a vendetta against him; that the politics of the drug-testing community were weighted against him in so far as the laboratory in Utrecht from which he drew his independent experts was up for IOC accreditation and the Germans were hoping to deny them this.

Erik de Bruin's case mirrors his wife's in other respects also. He invited a Professor Van Rossum to be his observer for the opening of his B sample in 1993. A defective testosterone/epitestosterone ratio was found, as well as traces of human chorionic gonadatropine.

When Van Rossum officially left the scene the second sample investigations were complete. But Manfred Donike carried out some further research on the second sample at this stage using new, hich-tech equipment which his laboratory had just acquired. Donike found traces of what was to become known as "the mysterious third substance". He was not, however, permitted to make details of this known.

On September 2nd, 1993, de Bruin took a summary case against his athletics federation to force them to lift an interim suspension of the thrower so he could compete while his case was pending with the IAAF. De Bruin's counsel, Mr Lobe, argued correctly that the federation didn't at the time have any regulations on drug-taking. De Bruin won the right not to have stanozolol mentioned during his proceedings. The other two substances remained, however.

In a court in Utrecht, a judge decided that, as an interim measure, de Bruin could participate in competitions at home but not internationally.

The Dutch paper De Volksrant reported in December of that year that, having got the benefit of the doubt from the court in Utrecht, de Bruin's first opportunity to throw would have been on January 22nd, 1994, in Zwolle. The Zwolle tournament scrapped its shot putt competition almost immediately.

That's the extent of the resounding victory won in the Dutch courts which surfed on a wave of anti-German defensiveness.

Both de Bruins have sufficient familiarity with the processes in these cases to separate the substantial from the spin. They are familiar, too, with the remedies open to them and the avenues which they can explore for redress.

Michelle de Bruin's case won't be resolved by means of a referendum conducted among the listeners of RTE call-in programmes. It comes down to dry-as-dust scientific and legal facts. All the injunctions, threats and conspiracy theories under the sun won't change the fact that if she has cheated she has perpetrated a fraud on us all, and that if she has been set up the entire apparatus of sports policing needs reform.

Nothing to do but let the facts separate themselves from the words.