Dr Gary O'Toole did a big, courageous and significant thing this weekend: he told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, thus joining the small knot of Irish swimming people prepared to do so.

Given the honour with which he has approached other issues in Irish swimming, it is no great shock to see that he has moved across the floor to stand with Sean Gordon and Donncha Redmond, the only other Irish swimming people to publicly admit their reservations about Michelle de Bruin.

I don't know Gary O'Toole. Back in 1996, I was in Atlanta when, from a desk in Montrose, he was charming the nation with his eyebrows and quiet reasoning. Returning with a headful of questions and a head half full of answers, I found that the fire blanket which the nation sought to wrap around Michelle de Bruin was Gary O'Toole.

"So how do you explain Gary O'Toole then," they would ask, playing their lucky talisman when I would spill out my little puddle of facts. How do you explain him?

Other journalists told me that the matinee idol Gary O'Toole sang sweeter songs than the off-screen version. Fattened by my own, defiant self-importance, I left Gary O'Toole to the other journalists.

Of all the people I spoke to about Michelle Smith/Michelle de Bruin, for some reason Gary O'Toole was never one of them. I'd see him on TV occasionally with Michelle de Bruin and wonder what his game was.

O'Toole's piece in yesterday's Sunday Independent is one of the most significant things I have read on the entire Michelle de Bruin affair. In the past five days we have suddenly made great advances to the core truth of the issues surrounding this case.

On the crucial mechanics of the January 10th case, Michelle de Bruin wrote in May that she and her husband, Erik, were on their "way out of the house. Erik went to the car and as usual I went to the gates to open them. There to meet me was one of the officials." She now tacitly admits that this was false. Erik was in bed, she emerged alone, opened the gates and disappeared from the testers view for a period of time which is disputed by the parties to the test. Key stuff.

And on the broader issue of how the story has been played out to the Irish public, and how the original notion of a vendetta (those Americans!) got started, Gary O'Toole has brought us close to the core.

Trawl through the panoply of major American papers at the time and you find a small minority questioning de Bruin, some ignoring her, most defending her. The key issue, however, has always been that the questions were much older than that. Michelle de Bruin was talking about those questions herself back in early 1995.

So take Gary O'Toole's evidence yesterday: "An ex coach of mine followed her (M de B) to the world championships in Rome in 1994 and reported back how suspicious fingers were being pointed and questions raised about her performances . . . Let there be no doubt that Janet Evans was two years behind many swimmers in her questioning of Michelle."

Anybody who took the trouble to ask questions, in Atlanta or before, knew that. Blaming the Americans and their "chauvinistic publicity machine" was the easy way out.

I remember on the night of Michelle de Bruin's second gold medal having a shouting match down the phone with the Sports Editor, who was in turn having shouting matches with other people in the newspaper about the rights and wrongs of reporting what was becoming the biggest story of the Olympics. With my hand over the receiver, I turned to a colleague and asked, "Jaysus! Are you having the same problems getting this into your paper?" And he turned serenely and said, "I don't want people at home to have to know about this." E pulled a documentary made by Greg Allen on the business of drugs and sport. And Now we have Gary O'Toole's candid revelations about his performances on RTE in the summer of 1996.

"I was one of the doubters . . . I had great difficulty accepting she was Olympic champion potential . . . I cringed when people staked their reputation on her total innocence . . . I refused to talk on screen about the drugs allegations. I don't know if there was a conscious decision from above, from the RTE Authority, but I knew I couldn't be genuine in my defence of her should questions be asked. Their refusal to put the questions suited me perfectly.

"I regret, however, that my silence was interpreted as support for Michelle de Bruin and often used as a weapon against those who dared question. Not one of the journalists who have written in defence of Michelle has ever sought my opinion."

So there it is. If the nation were not so fatigued by the whole affair, Gary O'Toole might have caught a lot of bitter flak for that admission. His piece was, however, a huge and honest act. I regret my arrogance in never having made Gary O'Toole's acquaintance. Here, in the cockpit of hysteria during the Olympics, he had a harder decision to make than myself or any of my print colleagues in Atlanta. He is the first of us to admit to having feet of clay. He stands taller for it. Taller than any of us who have ever written a piece merely to justify an earlier stance.

Many of us journalists who went to Atlanta as friends are no longer so cordial. We have been attacking each other in print for two years now, have been frostily hostile to each other in private for the same period. The little steel ball has stopped on red and some of us have scooped up our winnings and found ourselves swanning around TV studios making pompous eejits of ourselves.

It should never be like that. If FINA had never accused Michelle de Bruin of tampering, those who asked questions wouldn't exactly have wandered the earth hungering for "vindication". There is no such thing. We are not part of the story. We are a different story. Rather than talk of vindication or humiliation, there needs to be some quiet reflection on how and why the Irish media performed so badly overall on this issue.

Let's finish with Gary O'Toole, who has moved into an era of glasnost and perestroika. "I accept what they (FINA) are saying about Michelle de Bruin. If they say she cheated in January of 1998, I believe them. If they are shown to be wrong on appeal, then everything I ever believed in throughout my sporting career will stand for nothing."

That statement alone, coming as it does from an honest athlete, prohibits self-satisfaction, pomposity and the laying aside of the small demands of our job when it comes to sport.