imagine what she would be like having an orgasm:p…
She’s a thundering disgrace to the nation. And that’s just in relation to how ugly she is. I’m making no remarks about her alleged cheating in case she’s reading this. But I hate litigious cunts, especially when they don’t have a leg to stand on. That’s a general point too by the way.
I think the fact that threads like this are still regularly started over 12 years later pretty muchj disproves that.
Another shameful aspect of it was Smith and her cronies’ (Dervan, Hayes etc) attempts to blacken Al and Kay Guy’s names as if they were “out to get her”. Sickening stuff. She knocked something like seventeen seconds off her personal best for the 400m freestyle in a year form 4:25 down to 4:08. The great myth of course is that she never tested positive for anything. What a load of shit.
Guilty in court of public opinion; Michelle de Bruin was the golden
Sunday Herald, The, May 9, 1999 by Paul Howard
And so the penultimate piece of the jigsaw slides neatly into place and the ugliness of the picture becomes ever more apparent, even to those who for so long refused to see it.
When he argued to have Michelle de Bruin’s appeal hearing held in public, Peter Lennon could not have realised that he was accumulating a mass audience to witness the last vestiges of his client’s credibility being stripped away.
In a newspaper article three months ago, husband Erik de Bruin asked rhetorically: “Would someone please tell me why Michelle would put ethanol in a sample that did not contain a banned substance?” On Tuesday, despite loud and furious objections from his wife’s lawyer, FINA, swimming’s governing body, offered a one-word answer: androstenedione. For 12 months we have been invited to consider various fanciful conspiracy theories to explain the contamination of de Bruin’s urine sample with a lethal level of Irish whiskey. Lennon equated the case with the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, cleverly playing to the collective sense of victimhood ingrained in the Irish consciousness as early as the primary school history syllabus. He did so because he realises that the most important judgment will be delivered not by Lausanne’s Court of Arbitration in Sport but by the court of public opinion.
The court heard that de Bruin took the banned substance, which promotes the growth of testosterone in the body, between 10 and 12 hours before Al and Kate Guy doorstepped her to collect a urine sample that was eventually shown to have been contaminated with whiskey. Two other out-of-competition tests, which book-ended the fateful January 10 test, also revealed positive signs of the use of the testosterone precursor. It would be difficult to find a more compelling motive for contaminating the sample. Androstenedione will follow de Bruin. Even if she manages to get her four-year ban overturned for technical breaches in procedure - which seems unlikely as the court is traditionally averse to conspiracy theories, and needs only to establish that the procedures used were ‘reasonable’ - she will forever be a tainted champion. But then de Bruin already was that, a golden girl champion that suspiciously few companies wanted to be associated with.
When de Bruin came from a ranking outside the world’s top 150 to win an unprecedented five gold medals, two silvers and a bronze in the Olympics and European Championships between 1995 and '97, Ireland all but shunned her. In a land obsessed by sport, half a million Dubliners turned out to cheer the World Cup soccer team in 1990 and 200,000 turned out to welcome home Tour de France winner Stephen Roche. Less than 200 welcomed home de Bruin after her Olympic exploits.
An accumulated body of circumstantial evidence had already made a formidable case for the prosecution before that fateful test which led de Bruin to Lausanne. Questions were asked as far back as 1994 when, just months after Erik took over her coaching, the 24-year-old Irish swimmer knocked a remarkable 10 seconds off her time for the 400m individual medley at an age where performance normally declines. When de Bruin knocked nearly another nine seconds off her personal best to dominate the Atlanta Olympics, one American competitor all but accused of de Bruin of cheating, and even the those willing to give her the benefit of the doubt started asking some hard questions. Most of those questions surround her Dutch husband and coach, Erik de Bruin, a convicted and apparently unrepentant drugs cheat. “Who says doping is unethical?” he asked. “Sport is by definition dishonest. Some people are naturally gifted. Some people are not going to make it without extra help. For me, doping is a list of banned products, that’s all.”
Those were views which seem to have influenced his wife. “If you were to ask my views on such substances,” she wrote in her autobiography, A Triple Champion’s Story, “then I would say that I believe the same rules should apply to all and that there should be a level playing field.” Anondyne in the extreme until placed in the context of a time when the systematic doping of Chinese swimmers was an open secret. For all the circumstantial evidence, however, there is also irrefutable evidence that de Bruin’s remarkable improvement coincided with what seems to have been a concerted and premeditated attempt to avoid random out-of-competition testing. Throughout 1996 and 1997, both organisations had been bombarding the Dublin offices of the Irish Amateur Swimming Association with complaints about the unavailability of de Bruin for testing. Veronica Byrne, the Association’s paid administrator, had been receiving these missives since early 1995.
By January 1997, the tone had become demanding and strident. And no wonder. The Sunday Herald has seen those letters from FINA as well as de Bruin’s training schedule (totally blank apart from her name and nationality) and a hand-written letter from her. In that letter, she wrote: “I have filled the training schedule in to the best of my ability. Please consider that my programme changes from week to week. Sometimes I will have three training sessions per day using other pools. Sometimes my coach will decide that I need to rest and cancel a training session. It is difficult for me to predict in advance when this will happen. At other times I will be called away to fulfil other commitments.” FINA’s Cornel Marculescu complained that the '‘information is rather vague, and the daily calendar is not filled out." Even in Ireland questions were being asked as long ago as June 1994, when the Irish ASA meeting "noted that Michelle Smith has not supplied an address at which she can be contacted in Holland and all communication must be through her parents’ home in Rathcoole."
All was clearly not as it should be with de Bruin. There was the bizarre training schedule in Holland, effectively outside the control of the Irish ASA, which meant that no one could predict her movements. As de Bruin has squirmed this week, each block of her defence has been dismantled, and as she was losing the manipulation argument, FINA submitted evidence from Dr Jordi Segura, head of the IOC- accredited laboratory in Barcelona, which said she took androstenedione the night before the Guys swooped. No matter what the three-man panel decide, in the court of public opinion there is no hiding place for de Bruin. She had the motive, the opportunity and the means. She will forever be the tainted champion.
She should have used the angel dust to quietly slip into a Bronze medal then retired a hero after the Olympics. Winning three golds was taking the mick, questions were bound to be asked.