For Ireland’s Smith, success brought scrutiny

400-meter freestyle winner Michelle Smith from Ireland waves after getting a hug from Kerstin Kielgass of Germany at the Georgia Tech Aquatic Center, Monday, July 22, 1996 during the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta. (Cox file photo/Allen Eyestone)

Credit: ALLEN EYESTONE

Credit: ALLEN EYESTONE

400-meter freestyle winner Michelle Smith from Ireland waves after getting a hug from Kerstin Kielgass of Germany at the Georgia Tech Aquatic Center, Monday, July 22, 1996 during the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta. (Cox file photo/Allen Eyestone)

In July and August 1996, the world sent its finest athletes to Atlanta. Some athletes came as familiar names from familiar nations. Others had toiled in obscurity. Each came proudly to Atlanta, and Atlanta received them in the same manner. To commemorate the 20th anniversary of those Summer Games, the AJC offers 20 memorable athletes and performances.

The 14th in the series: Ireland’s Michelle Smith wins gold, but later was erased from record books in her homeland.

Michelle Smith de Bruin once was the undisputed sporting queen of Ireland. Today, she does her best to remain out of the public eye.

Publicly, De Bruin has denied the charges of tampering with her urine sample, an offense that brought her a four-year ban by the international swimming federation in 1998 and effectively ended her career. But the last public defense likely was some time ago.

“She’s very low-profile,” said Gary O’Toole, a former Irish Olympic swimmer and contemporary of Smith’s.

She has maintained a quiet presence despite working as an attorney, or a barrister, as one class of lawyers are known in Ireland. She earned her law degree in 2005 and in 2008 published a law text (“Transnational Litigation: Jurisdiction and Procedure”).

“She is well-respected as being a hardworking, thorough barrister who represents her clients well and never fails to do well by them, as well as can be expected,” O’Toole said. “She’s not a miracle worker, but she doesn’t assume things. She’s known to be meticulous in her preparation. She’s doing fine, from that point of view.”

De Bruin, who did not respond to an email requesting an interview, lives in the small town of Kells, northwest of Dublin. She has two children and remains married to Erik de Bruin, her former coach and the man whose past helped make her a target of suspicion well before the tampering finding. He had been a Dutch discus thrower and shot putter who himself was banned by the international track federation for using banned substances. Her substantial time drops at a late stage in her career — at 26, she won the 400-meter individual medley in Atlanta in 4:39.18, almost 20 seconds faster than her time at the 1992 Olympics — and her broad physique raised more eyebrows.

To O’Toole, a surgeon who has served as a swimming commentator, de Bruin almost has ceased to exist in Irish sports culture. In 1999, the Irish national swimming federation erased Smith’s marks from its record books by writing a new constitution that prohibited swimmers who had been or were suspended from holding records.

“In terms of how she’s thought about in sporting achievements on a national basis, she really has never been mentioned as having won Olympic gold medals,” he said. “It’s kind of glossed over.”

Ireland treasures its few sporting greats. This nation of 4.6 million, for instance, has four living gold medalists, including de Bruin.

“It’s not like we can shake a stick and an Olympic gold medalist will appear from every town,” O’Toole said.

The other three appear at virtually every major sporting function, O’Toole said, but de Bruin does not, though he wasn’t sure if that was because she isn’t invited or chooses to not attend. The last time O’Toole said he saw her in person was probably 1998, the year she was banned.

She is not without her backers. O’Toole wouldn’t say that it’s an overwhelming majority of Irish sports fans who believe she was guilty. In 2012, a noted Irish sports commentator asserted that Smith should have carried the Olympic torch when it went through Ireland on its way to London. He pointed out that Smith’s medals weren’t stripped and that she never failed a drug test. It might be worth mentioning that, in the same interview, he said that he thought the doping case against cycling Lance Armstrong was “nonsense.”

De Bruin gave an interview in 2013 to the Irish Independent newspaper in which she responded to various prompts. One was the best advice she had ever received.

“’If you do what you always did, you’ll get what you always got,’” she said. “That was the advice given to me by my husband when he became my coach and started to change the way that I trained prior to winning three gold medals at the Olympic Games.”