When Michelle De Bruin faces her inquisitors in Lausanne this afternoon the occasion will mark a strange confluence of disparate careers in the same sport.

By means of her controversial late escape from respectable mediocrity to the promised land of Olympic history, De Bruin has enjoyed a swimming career far more luminous than those of the three lawyers she will face.

Harm Beyer, the best known and most influential of the three, will chair the meeting in his capacity as chairman of FINA's nine-man doping commission. He is a juvenile court magistrate in Germany, but most of his career in the internal sporting politics of his country was spent looking across the border at East Germany and silently acknowledging the drug-fuelled achievements of that nation's swimmers.

Beyer has a long history of involvement with swimming, having been president of the German Swimming Federation through much of the 1980s. Throughout that time he was vocal and passionate about the issue of cheating in the sport.

In 1992, in seething frustration at persistent inaction by swimming authorities, he waspishly proposed that a "circus troupe" of doped athletes be set up. By then the East Germans had disbanded and the Chinese were apparently taking up the baton of pharmaceutical excellence.

"I don't see any consistent action or honesty (at present)" said Beyer at the time. "If German sport says it is against doping, then we should have the courage to be consistent about violations, but the moment we discover that athletes , coaches, officials or physicians have done something forbidden, the first thing we do is amnesty all of them."

Some irony here. In November 1991, Beyer persuaded 20 former East German coaches to make a mass confession about doping in their country. The deal was on the basis that no punishments would be levied. Beyer claimed this was so that "a necessary reckoning with the past, an integration into a unified German swimming establishment, could begin".

Beyer is also the only one of the three lawyers to have had personal contact with the De Bruins in the past. It was Beyer who interceded when Erik de Bruin acquired (having been refused accreditation because he was serving a drug ban himself) the accreditation of a Belgian coach and accompanied Michelle Smith into the doping control area at the European Championships in Vienna in 1995.

De Bruin was apprehended filling out objections to the procedure in Dutch. Beyer's instinct was to throw the swimmer and her coach out of the competition. The doping control area is a sacrosanct part of any sporting competition. Trespass by any unaccredited person, let alone one serving a drug ban, is a very serious matter. It took a full day of entreaties from IASA officials before Beyer changed his mind and relented.

Erik de Bruin didn't endear himself any further to Beyer last summer when the European Championships came around again, this time in Seville. Beyer, still nettled by the arrogance of De Bruin's performance in Vienna, refused to grant accreditation to him until he personally explained his actions and apologised.

After a brief stand-off between the two parties, De Bruin presented himself before Beyer and explained his actions in a perfunctory manner.

The German acknowledged the Dutchman's small gesture and said that he could proceed to the accreditation centre. Yet in a move designed to antagonise the German, Erik de Bruin had already got himself accredited. He removed the accreditation badge from his pocket and waved it front of Beyer's face before leaving the room.

Within months Erik de Bruin may have been regretting his little victory. When reports from Doping Tests and management in Sweden and the IOC laboratory in Spain both indicated that Michelle de Bruin was heading for a disciplinary meeting with the doping commission, Beyer would have been forgiven if a thin smile crossed his lips.

Beyer was appointed last year to the Chair of FINA's doping commission by that body's Algerian president, Mustapha Larfaoui.

One of Larfoui's comptriots, Ben Belkacen Farid, joins Beyer on the doping panel today. The third member of the doping commission to sit on today's panel is Bernard Favaro. Both men are lawyers, with backgrounds in swimming. They, too, are part of the nine-man commission set up last year.

Beyer and any two of the remaining eight form the three-person disciplinary committees which dispense bans and suspensions to strayed swimmers.

They will listen to presentations from Michelle de Bruin (if, as expected, she attends the hearing) and Peter Lennon, her solicitor, and will then ask questions of the De Bruin team before retiring to consider their verdict.

Given the nature of the offence it is with their ambit to dispense a life-time ban on the swimmer. If Erik de Bruin and Harm Beyer's eyes should meet in FINA headquarters today, the phrase `what goes around come around' is bound to present itself in the space between them.