Many people in the world of swimming will view Michelle de Bruin's latest brush with the regulations as an accident waiting to happen. Following the controversy which has trailed her since she came from virtual obscurity to win three gold medals in the Atlanta Olympics, de Bruin has been under the spotlight almost constantly.

In January of 1997 FINA (the governing body of world swimming) contacted the swimmer and her domestic federation, the IASA, to complain about her unavailability for a random drugs test in Celbridge the previous October. FINA also complained about the vagueness of details supplied by de Bruin regarding her training schedules for the first three months of 1997.

It wasn't the first time problems had occurred. In April of Olympic year (1996), de Bruin had been required to fill out the standard form indicating where her training facilities would be for the next three months. She stated simply that she didn't know, making her perhaps unique among the 10,000 athletes preparing for the biggest occasion of their lives.

FINA had written a year previously concerning her unavailability for random drug tests in the first three-quarters of 1995, during which she had missed another test. Swimmers, in common with elite athletes in many other disciplines, are required to keep their domestic federations informed as to their whereabouts at any given time. They are required to complete forms which provide details of home addresses, training venues and daily routines. Should they deviate from this routine they are required to contact their federation in advance. Random drug testers may call to home addresses or training venues at any time when it has been suggested that the swimmer will be present.

On Monday, February 3rd, 1997, Michelle de Bruin narrowly missed another test when the testing team called to an address in Celbridge at which she had been staying. Technically, having been cited twice for missed tests, she then became eligible for a ban.

On Friday 23rd of February, 1997, the FINA executive met in Lausanne to discuss de Bruin's case and to examine the legality of the very rule which FINA congress had toughened up in Atlanta the previous summer.

Aware of an anomaly in the rule concerning swimmers who missed random drug tests, FINA moved to bring the punishment for missing tests into line with that which existed for refusals to be tested or positive tests.

The two-year ban for missing three random tests was therefore doubled to four years, with a proviso (if deemed appropriate) allowing FINA to strip the swimmer of all medals and records achieved within the previous 12 months.

By late in February, FINA were already considering the legal ramifications of imposing such a sanction on an Olympic champion swimmer. Following the warning sent to the IASA and de Bruin in January 1997, the fact that the swimmer had missed another random test on February 3rd when testers from IDTM (the Swedish agency which tests on behalf of FINA) called to the Celbridge house where Michelle de Bruin and her husband Erik de Bruin were staying made her technically eligible for a ban.

Michelle de Bruin had spent some time the previous week staying in the Berkeley Court hotel but had checked out on the Friday morning to spend the weekend in Kildare before returning to Dublin to accept a Texaco award at a reception in the Burlington hotel on Monday, February 3rd. She checked into the Burlington at some time after five o clock. A tester called to the Celbridge house within an hour of her having left for Dublin.

When the FINA executive gathered in Lausanne later that month they were concerned that the gap between Michelle de Bruin's stated time of departure and the testing team's stated time of arrival was too small to withstand the legal challenge which would inevitably follow such a landmark case.

FINA decided that the legal dimensions of their own rule book would be placed under particular scrutiny and as such they convened a meeting of their own medical and doping commissions for the following Wednesday afternoon to investigate the issue further.

The meeting the following Wednesday was attended by Gunnar Werner, the Swedish lawyer who acts as honorary secretary to FINA, Harm Beyer, a Hamburg magistrate and the chair of the doping commission, Dr James Taffy Cameron, an English doctor and honorary secretary to the medical commission, as well as Cornel Marculescu, the Romanian executive director of FINA.

The meeting began around midday, dragged on for seven hours and was ultimately inconclusive. Two representatives of IDTM, the Swedish drug-testing agency, were present to give their account of the missed test of February 3rd. A decision was finally taken not to proceed at that stage with suspending Michelle de Bruin. Another warning letter was sent to the swimmer.

By then Michelle de Bruin was preparing in somewhat fraught circumstances for her first competitive Irish swim in 12 months. Following the publication in The Irish Times of previous warning letters sent to the IASA by FINA concerning other missed tests she had ceased dealing directly with her own swimming federation and had begun contacting Cornel Marculescu of FINA directly on such matters. She had also decided to refuse to accept the offer of life membership of the IASA.