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Almost 28 years on, Michelle Smith de Bruin’s Olympic splash continues to make waves

Swimmer’s career ended two years after Atlanta 1996 when the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled against her after she was found to have tampered with a urine sample

The 1996 Olympics and her three gold medals are part of her high-profile career that Michelle Smith de Bruin remembers with a great sense of pride. Photograph: Frank Miller

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Johnny Watterson
Fri May 10 2024 - 06:00

Last week in a provincial swim meeting in Dublin’s Aquatic Centre, Ellen Walshe smashed one of Ireland’s longest-standing national records. Walshe swam the fastest 400m individual medley (IM) by an Irish woman ever, breaking a 28-year-old record.

That record was set by Michelle Smith de Bruin in Atlanta 1996, while on her way to winning Olympic gold.

To many in Irish swimming it was a significant moment. The time of 4:39.18 had been out of reach for Irish women since Smith de Bruin became one of the most talked-about athletes of the Atlanta Olympics. Not until Katie Taylor arrived in London 2012 to win gold had any Irish athlete attracted close to as much global media attention.

On the opening night of swimming action in the Georgia Tech pool, Smith de Bruin blew away the field in the 400m IM, her winning time almost three seconds faster than second-placed American Allison Wagner and just under 20 seconds quicker than what she had posted four years previously at the Olympic Games in Barcelona.

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Two days later, Smith de Bruin won her second gold medal, taking the 400m freestyle in 4:07.25. The event was relatively new for the Irish swimmer, whose best time at the start of that year was almost 19 seconds slower. The Atlanta freestyle swim was also an Irish record, one that still stands to this day, as does the time she set in the 200m butterfly.

[ Michelle Smith de Bruin praises ‘stunning performance’ of rowing medallists ]

The 1996 Olympics and her three gold medals are part of her high-profile career that Smith de Bruin remembers with a great sense of pride.

In a home/style/celebrity Q&A piece printed in 2013, she was asked to choose a picture that spoke a thousand words. She picked the one of her standing beside then-US president Bill Clinton, who amid fevered commotion arrived at the swimming event with his daughter Chelsea and wrapped his arms around Smith de Bruin. Feeling her pain, Clinton said to her: “I admire you for all the crap they’ve thrown at you.”

In Smith de Bruin’s words for the Q&A: “I have a photo of myself with Bill Clinton, which was taken at the Atlanta Olympic Games. I am dressed in my Irish track gear and it was a proud moment.”

Her controversial career would come to an end two years after that meeting with Clinton, when the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas), following a public hearing, ruled against her. Fina, the world governing body for swimming, imposed a four-year ban. Smith de Bruin was found to have tampered with a urine sample, one taken by Irish testers Al and Kay Guy at her home, Kellsgrange House, in Kilkenny.

At 28 years old, the ban effectively ended Smith de Bruin’s swimming career.

However, the Olympic gold medals won were kept, and some of the records set there have stood the test of time in Irish record books. Come this summer’s Olympics in Paris they will be 28 years old.

[ Sporting Controversies: Irish mist descends upon Michelle Smith’s fairytale ]

For comparison, in the Irish men’s record list for individual swims there is no record older than six years – Shane Ryan’s 100m freestyle and 50m backstroke marks set in 2018. At world level there are no individual female long-course records older than from 2009. That record belongs to Zige Liu in the 200m butterfly, set while swimming in a body suit.

Most of the women’s world records are a handful of years old, many set last year.

But between February 2008 and December 2009, a whole host of marks were broken due to the advent of bodysuits or “super-suits”, which were made of polyurethane and sanctioned by the sport’s governing body.

They were eventually banned because they were seen to provide a greater advantage to larger athletes, but not before the 2009 World Championships in Rome, where the sport witnessed 43 world records falling.

Many at the time feared that world records would not be broken again for a long time, but a decade and a half on, Liu’s remains the only one.

Over those two or three years around 1996, it was difficult to keep up with the speed and variety of Smith de Bruin’s breathtaking swims as she set new marks and broke new ground. In the year before Atlanta, she set Irish records in the freestyle at 50m, 100m, 400m and 800m, the butterfly at 100m and 200m, the medley events at 200m and 400m and the backstroke at 100m.

She constructed a private wall of national records.

Each year since, the bricks have been unpicked and taken down one by one, and each time one is removed it acts as a reminder of the size of Smith de Bruin’s reach from the mid-1990s through to the end of the first quarter of this century. Her swims were not just about winning three gold medals and posting records. They were also about Irish swimmers of the generations that would follow, swimmers such as Walshe, whose 4:37.94 now sets the Irish standard for the 400m IM.

[ De Bruin snub a disgrace, says Coghlan ]

Two Irish records remain from Atlanta, in the 400m freestyle and 200m butterfly. They sit there, immovable and ageing, from a different era, when an Irish swimmer rattled the swimming world and paid the price. Smith de Bruin’s impact did not stop in Atlanta but has travelled in time, continuing since to cast a long shadow over Irish swimming.

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