20 Years On: Is Michelle Smith The Least Lauded Triple Olympic Champion In History?

This week 20 years ago, Michelle Smith won three gold and 1 bronze in the pool at the Atlanta 1996 Games. As doping issues threaten to rock the Rio 2016 Games, we look back at a fallen star who kept her medals

It was at the 1972 Munich Olympics when an Irish report rehashed an old joke by spilling the news that Ireland had celebrated a record-breaking day in the pool: no-one drowned.

Imagine then how thrilled everyone was when Michelle Smith* transformed herself from also swam to triple Olympic champion with a tail-end bronze going on for 27 at Atlanta 1996, thuse delivering single-handedly Ireland’s second-largest ever medal haul at one Games.

As we contemplate the 40th anniversary of the 1976 Games and all the woe associated with it and State Plan 14:25 and at a time when the Russian doping crisis is set to spill on every day of the Rio 2016 Games, the middle point in that time span brings us to one of the greatest controversies in swimming history and a reminder that more often than not the swimmer that falls foul of anti-doping rules gets to keep the big prizes regardless.

A barrister these days, Smith, later Smith de Bruin after she married Erik de Bruin*, the Dutch thrower suspended for doping before he took up coaching his wife-to-be in what for him was uncharted waters – swimming.

“Michelle Smith’s father taught his daughters how to swim, and Smith was first spotted by a lifeguard in Tallaght swimming pool at age 9…” so starts the first line of her “Swimming Career” on the wiki page about her.

“In the early hours of 21 July 1996, a new question was added to the list of great Irish sporting queries…. where we you the day…” So begins “Gold, A triple Champion’s Story“, by Cathal Dervan.

Under normal circumstances such things entice and are followed by a recommendation to dig deeper and savour the story of a sporting legend.

With Smith it is a case of setting all such things aside for they become less interesting, at best, and irrelevant, at worst, as we focus on her fall from grace and vindication for those who had spent two years before Atlanta 1996 asking: “Really – and what might be behind this most unusual profile and progress?”

Take this, from the book of off-the-chart moments in swimming – Smith’s chart in her two medley Olympic-title winning events, 1992 to 1996, ages 22 (by which time she had had four solid years as a senior swimmer behind her, complete with some world-class coaching overseas) to 26 – best times, season by season:

200m medley – 2:23.83 in 1992; 2:19.48, 1993; no progress 2014; 2:15.27, 1995, 2:13.93, Olympic title 1996 400m medley – 4:58.94 in 1992; 4:57.17, 1993; 4:47.89 in 1994; 4:42.81 in 1995; 4:39.18, Olympic title 1996

The medley thrust in the story is key. Smith had been a decent 400IMer, ranked at 117th in the world in 1992, after 113th in 1990, and a spike in form at 4:56.52 for 79th in the world in 1991.

The 4:56 to 5min zone was the best of Smith until a significant switch was flicked in 1994, her breakthrough year: 4:47.89 – huge progress at the World Championships for a world No17 rank. The 200m butterfly at that meet produced another big best, a 2:12.79 in her first global major final leaving her fifth, though 3sec shy of the podium. She’s make that up by Atlanta 1996.

But it was in 1995 that the raised eyebrow of the specialist stretched to swimmers, coaches and a wider audience contemplating a 25-year-old not yet wholly transformed but radically altered.

When Olympic champion Krisztina Egerszegi (HUN) – seasons chart: 4:44.75 1989, aged 15; 4:36.54, 1992 Olympic gold; 4:39.55, 1993; 4:43.19, 1994 – took the European 400Im cown in 4:40.33 at Vienna 1995, Smith de Bruin was remarkably close: 4:42.81, a time that represented the kind of 2-year progress you might expect to see in a 14 to 16-year-old not a swimmer all but a decade beyond that.

That year of 1995, it would come to be known in 1998, FINA anti-doping chiefs had expressec concern to the Irish Amateur Swimming Association about their struggle, throughout most of the year, to track Smnith down and conduct out-of-competition testing.

Leap on a year and Smith would clock 4:39.18 in the 400IM for the first of her three Olympic golds, each passing one raising the noise level among rivals, leading coaches and just about anyone who knew their swimming. How was this possible. It was not just the time and the victory but the manner of victory. The turn from breaststroke to freestyle was one of those moments when observers, this one included, knew that Smith could not lose: she was driving off the wall in a way the rest of the best could not cope with. Smith was not so much out-swimming her rivals as put-powering them:

A taste of those evening post-races in Atlanta:

If the 200m medley gold and the 200m butterfly bronze inside 2:10 for the first time after never having seen sub-2:20 just three seasons earlier were a part of an astonishing week for a swimmer reborn, reshaped and destined to be redefined with two years, then it was the 400m freestyle story that had folk steeped in sweeping shaking their heads.

To Canada, to Texas and to internationals across Europe and that wider world went Smith in pursuit of progress in the pool but none of the world-class coaches nor programmes could get her inside a 4:55 in the 400m medley, while a 4:20 on freestyle would have constituted a big breakthrough swim slower than the time it took Shane Gould to win the 1972 Olympic title.

And so we arrive in 1996 and Smith is three years into a plan of progress masterminded by De Bruin, a man to whom the swimmer often appeared to defer and who once told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant:

“Who says doping is unethical? Who decides what is unethical? …

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