When making a splash is a family affair

IT'S one of those weekends for Irish Olympic swimmer Marion Madine. Yesterday she was back in Newcastle doing the last exam for her Graduate Diploma in Legal Studies, tomorrow she climbs on a plane to America where she will train at high altitude for the next three weeks.

Today, and only today, she gets to put her feet up with the family back in her native Belfast.

Not that she'll get to forget about her swimming for the day. When your father is the Irish Olympic Coach and your mother represented Ireland at the Europeans the subject always tends to be at the forefront, but after two decades around or, more precisely, in pools the 25 year old is well used to that by now.

Even through these closing stages of her legal training in the north east of England she has lodged with a couple whose son is a swimmer, while for four hours every day, as she moves towards a career as a solicitor in Nottingham in the Autumn, there is work to be done in the water.

Asked about her hectic workload over the years, Madine herself occasionally seems a bit mystified by it all. Clearly very intelligent with a bright future ahead of her in the legal profession, she struggles to explain the extent of her commitment to swimming over the years. "I suppose I never knew any different".

If the agenda in her early career in the sport might be fairly credited to her father and coach Bobby, her more recent efforts have been dedicated to the pursuit of an Olympic dream which was cruelly stolen from her by the Olympic Council of Ireland four years ago in the build up to Barcelona.

"Basically I made the times that they set for me and then they didn't take me," she recalls. "I remember sitting out in my back garden on an exercise bike and my dad coming out and telling me they're not taking you or Gina Galligan and I remember thinking this is bad, why do you set targets for people and then ignore them? I just said OK, though, and peddled on, which was the way I dealt with things back then."

In fact, she recalls, the full impact of the OCI's decision only hit her as she watched the Games at her home and realised that a time she had achieved in March would have been comfortably good enough to get to the B final of the 200 metres butterfly.

The difference between now and then, Madine feels, is that these days she has taken control of her sporting career having, she admits, only really matured as a swimmer during her early twenties.

With the encouragement of her mother, Heather Madine (nee Agnew) and father Bobby, Marion certainly started young, and her experiences of the pool stretch further back than her memory.

"I could certainly swim by the time I was four. .. I'm told," she says. At 13 she competed for, and won, her first underage Irish title, and by the time she was 15 she found herself representing Northern Ireland at the Edinburgh Commonwealth Games.

With the exception of this last event, there is little that sticks out for Madine when she thinks back to those formative years for, as she puts it herself, "at that stage my father just set the targets and I just went out and did them".

It was a very positive but pretty disciplined environment, getting up at 6.0 a.m. to swim, going to school and heading on to music lessons before returning to homework and the inevitable early night. Then, while at college in Queens, she began to reflect on exactly what it was she was aiming for in a way she had not before. "It was at that point that I realised that a lot of my problems were mental in that I simply didn't think enough about what I was doing. Up until then my dad had set all of my goals, but around then I got in with a few triathletes and started doing weight training - a form of preparation her father had tended to steer her away from - with them and from then on I started taking a more active role in deciding what I was doing."

The result was that, over the next couple of years, she became far more focussed in her swimming. But, while she has trained for the past year under one of Britain's leading coaches, Paul Remmonds, on Tyneside, Bobby remains a central influence on her swimming career.

At the moment he is attempting to find a gala for her to swim in, as she attempts to make the Olympic standard for her preferred butterfly events over the coming weeks. While she is already certain of a place in the 200 metres and 400 metres freestyle races, the butterfly qualifying times for both the 100 metres and 200 metres have thus far narrowly eluded her.

She has already managed the B marks that would allow her to travel if none of her teammates had not done better hut, with Michelle Smith already an A qualifier, it is up to the northerner to further improve her own performances.

The former Leander club swimmer went very close in Austria in May, when she came within a second of both marks but, just when she seemed likely to improve on those performances at the North East County and British Grand Prix championships in the traditionally fast Sheffield international pool, she suffered a somewhat unforeseen setback in the form of chicken pox.

The result is that, with only six weeks to go to the opening day of competition in the Atlanta pool, it appears that Madine will have to settle for her two freestyle outings. "If I make it I do, if not then that's my own hard luck. It's still better than making the time and then being told that I can't go anyway," says Madine.

FAILURE to meet the target would also deprive Madine of the chance to race against the swimmer who knocked her off the top of the Irish butterfly rankings. But it quickly becomes apparent that despite Smith's highly successful switch from the backstroke and Individual Medley to her territory over the past couple of years, the northerner still doesn't see the European Champion in terms of being a rival.

In fact the two, as far as Madine can remember, have only ever raced against each other once. "I've known her for years and we've been friends since we used to go away on Irish teams together but we weren't rivals then and we aren't now. She just swims faster than me," she adds with an endearing giggle "but there are a lot of people in the world who swim faster than me so that's not really such a big deal."

A particularly tight training schedule between now and the opening of the Games would appear to make qualification in the butterfly especially problematic with the next three weeks taken up with high altitude work with most of the rest of the Irish squad at Flagstaff in Arizona, after which everything will be geared towards ensuring a personal best performance at the games themselves.

"If you're in any way an aerobic swimmer the altitude work make a huge difference and it makes loads to me," she says. The altitude training, along with the system of Lactate testing which helps to monitor swimmers' proximity to their peak is supervised by her father Bobby who has linked up several times in recent years to exchange ideas with coaches from the former East German camp.

"They were communists who wanted to be capitalists," he remarks, "with the knowledge they had they could have dominated the sport anyway, but they got greedy and cheated." For Marion the high altitude work is the "legal equivalent of blood doping" with the additional red blood cells it helps to produce giving a boost to performances at three and six weeks after the programme has been concluded.

At the 1994 Commonwealth Games in Canada, it was this sort of preparation that helped the Belfast woman to a fourth place in the 200 metres butterfly.

"As far as the freestyle goes, I'll be looking to produce far better times than I managed in Austria which were PBs by quite a bit. I'd be delighted to get into B finals. If I get into the 200 fly, though, a B final certainly, while a final would be a bonus."

Then, come August, the Olympics will be part of her history and Marion Madine, as she always does, will be looking forward again.

Not for long, though, for after spending the better part of her life, so far, competing in the pool, she sees the next Commonwealth Games as the most likely event to mark her departure from the competitive end of the sport at this level. "Kuala Lumpur in 1998 has a nice ring to it," she sighs, safe, one presumes, in the knowledge that her participation is unlikely to spark a debate.