On the morning in January when Al Guy and his wife Kay called to the front gate of Kellsgrange House in Kilkenny the occupants must have been feeling quietly pleased with the way life had unfolded. A car accident at a road junction in Kilkenny in the previous autumn had left Michelle de Bruin with a neck injury which had finally cost her the chance to travel to Perth for the World Swimming Championships.

Surveying the news media that Saturday morning and absorbing the details of the scandals linking Chinese swimmers to the use of human growth hormone, Michelle and her husband Erik must have breathed a sigh of relief that they weren't present as bystanders when yet another drug-related bomb went off in the world of swimming.

For some time the de Bruins had been the great unsolved enigmas of the swimming scene. They kept themselves to themselves and competed relatively infrequently on the circuit. A back injury and a dose of glandular fever were among the causes of their sporadic appearances.

By January of this year, however, life was more tranquil than it had been in the turbulent aftermath of Michelle's rise to fame. They were out of the limelight of Perth where bored journalists hungry for her views on the Chinese would have hounded the Olympic champion, they were setting up their own swim club to be called MS3Gold and life was relatively good.

After the road accident, Opel, which provided the couple with a complimentary car, had replaced the crashed vehicle but then a wealthy business man had provided a Lexus for the pair and honorary membership of a top golf club. The Opel was returned.

A career path was also becoming evident. The Olympic success hadn't spawned an enduring relationship with the commercial world. There had been too much controversy and too little abiding interest in swimming among an Irish public who might or might not tune into the pool once every four years for the Olympic Games. The fact that Michelle was on her third agent in less than two years hardly helped either.

Yet a pattern was emerging. TV was shaping the future of swimming and celebrity and talent could be cashed in away from the big meets and in the form of record attempts or head-to-head skins matches. Apart from picking up a hefty cheque from TNT for breaking an old East German-held 200-metre butterfly European record in Cork the previous August, she had travelled to Australia and Brazil to compete for cash. The Leinster branch of the IASA had also invited her and Erik to conduct a couple of clinics with young swimmers.

Hoping to squeeze a few more years out of a long career, swimming for cash and records regularly and medals occasionally looked like the way forward.

In November she had declined the IASA's invitation to appear in its Christmas Crackers Gala citing her commitment to training for Perth but had written back with an inquiry concerning an invitation to compete in the spring championships in Galway: "Could you please let me know how much the committee will contribute to my training fund and I will inform you of my availability as quickly as possible after that."

The European championship in Seville the previous August had been a triumph too. Two gold medals was modest enough loot considering the windfall of Atlanta but the media treatment had been light and there had been a small victory over Erik being denied accreditation to the championships because of an incident at doping control at the previous European championships.

De Bruin had been called upon to explain himself and had done so reluctantly before being told he could proceed to apply for accreditation.

"You can imagine how furious he [doping commission chairman Mr Harm Beyer] was to find out that Erik already had his accreditation around his neck," Michelle wrote in her ghosted Irish Independent column the following day.

She had done media work and done it well, appearing as co-presenter of The Sporting Press Gang on RTE television and picking her interview spots shrewdly, a tactic which culminated in a touching soft-focus interview on The Late Late Show in September.

The controversy which had accompanied the success which arrived late in her career looked as if it had abated somewhat. Erik and Michelle were on their way to an engagement in Dublin. Then the doorbell rang.

The tester doesn't always knock twice.

ON THE Saturday evening when Michelle de Bruin won her first Olympic medal at the age of 26, a large knot of swimming officials and journalists hovered on a small grassy patch behind the Georgia Tech until long after the sun had gone down.

Michelle and Erik did a lengthy interview for Dutch TV and then sat down on two garden chairs to speak with RTE's George Hamilton. The medal hanging from the swimmer's neck glinted under the lights. RTE disappeared and the print journalists closed in.

The mood changed perceptibly. Specialist swimming journalists had a raft of technical questions which they needed answered. In sporting terms, swimming is a relatively precise science, nobody uses the expression "swimming is a funny old game", and the Irish swimmer had just altered the boundaries.

Huge improvements, late in swimming life, under the guidance of a discus thrower serving a drugs ban, training in secret and suddenly muscled up. Curiosity and rumour were widespread.

There are physiological and hydrodynamic reasons why girls in late adolescence with long unfilled-out bodies and an explosion of the right natural chemicals inside them perform so brilliantly in the pool.

The new Olympic champion sat in one chair as a small number of journalists asked questions about her background. Erik de Bruin dealt with queries from a group of European and US journalists.

Suddenly there was the sound of raised voices and shouting and de Bruin was on his feet refusing to answer questions about his own past and making his broad-shouldered way towards the sanctuary of indoors. His wife of six weeks followed quickly.

For some of those present the little tableau came as no surprise. Questions had been in the air for more than a year and later an Irish swimming official would resign his post, stating that speculation had been a topic of conversation in Irish Amateur Swimming Association circles for some years. But FINA, which spends more than £500,000 a year on its out-of-competition testing programme, had never turned up anything positive on the swimmer.

Two days later the US swimmer Janet Evans conceded what everybody in Atlanta knew, that Michelle de Bruin was a topic of conversation on the pooldeck.

All hell broke loose.

Since the East Germans muscled up under a regime known as Unterstutzende Mittel (supporting means) the history of women's swimming had been shaped by means more foul than fair.

The baton was passed to the Chinese and while FINA sought, with much bungling and ineptitude, to fight the scourge of state-sponsored doping, critics inside the sport wondered how long it would be before individuals and their coaches began juicing up.

The year before the Olympics, a 15-yearold US girl, Jessica Fischi, tested positive for steroids. Janet Evans, produced by the de Bruins' defenders as the wicked jingoistic witch of Atlanta, urged the US authorities to treat her as they would any foreign swimmer.

The questioning of de Bruin had little to do with US jingoism as generally portrayed in the Irish media and everything to do with the couple's habits and the sport's troubled history.

The secrecy in which the de Bruins shrouded themselves was at times baffling. This newspaper was told just before the Olympic Games that the location of the flume in which Michelle had done her stroke analysis had to remain a secret. In the wake of a success which was not just historic but potentially very lucrative the couple insisted on keeping all detail of their regime secret.

With Erik's record and past pronouncements of ambivalence on the issue of doping filling the Atlanta air like the scent of dogwood, and the achievements she was producing every two days causing a readjustment in the history books, Michelle De Bruin said she understood why the questions were asked but the secrecy remained.

Occasionally crumbs of information about the couple's training regime would leak out. Representatives of the World Swim Coaches' Association pronounced these as differing in no way from the things which other swimmers did.

Michelle and Erik came home to a nation delighted by her success and bitter with those who questioned or analysed them.

WHEN AL GUY (who may soon wish to add the letter F to the start of his christian name and the letter L to the end) brought his bag of testing paraphernalia to the de Bruins' door in January for a random test he did so against the backdrop of a steadily more vigilant FINA campaign to catch doping cheats.

The suspension of four Chinese swimmers and the interception of a Chinese official attempting to bring human growth hormone into Australia were a coup although the irony was that if his swimmers had brought the substance in in their bodies, FINA's urine testing could never have detected it.

FINA, under pressure of a breakaway from the World Swim Coaches' Association, had assuaged its critics for the time being with the tough way it had dealt with the Chinese whom Michelle de Bruin herself had pointed the finger at in 1995, wondering if she might have been robbed by them at the 1994 World Championships in Rome.

By January of this year, however, Michelle de Bruin was old news in world swimming circles. Nothing can be ruled out in the strange world of sporting politics but the notion that the governing body of swimming, cited so often in the past as having given the swimmer a clean bill of health, was running a vendetta against its triple Olympic champion seems absurd.

The form on these matters generally is to bury them and hope for the best, as anybody who has studied the incidents of discarded positive tests from the last four Olympic celebrations will testify.

The details of the Guys' two-hour visit to Kellsgrange House will be hammered out over the next couple of months in the same detail as the Kennedy assassination.

In short, they sealed the bottles and filled out the control forms in the de Bruins' presence and with Michelle's consent. The chain of custody from there to Barcelona four days later will have been documented at every stage. On arrival at the lab the seal code numbers will have been checked and recorded. It seems likely that there will be a clear forensic trail of some sort.

Reduced to its constituent parts, the case so far boils down to a couple of conflicting versions. Either the whiskey fragranced substance was expelled by Michelle de Bruin from a vessel secreted within her body during the collection of the urine sample or somebody else went away, found out the codes, opened all the layers of security tape etc and tossed a measure of whiskey in. Or, thirdly, someone in the FINA end of the operation tampered with the sample to de Bruin's detriment.

FINA has yet to expand on the business of the testosterone precursor mentioned in the laboratory report and no explanation has yet been made public regarding the longitudinal analysis of de Bruin's urine samples over a period of time.

For Michelle de Bruin and the public which watched every stroke and cheered every medal in Atlanta, it is a strange twilight zone of uncertainty, filled with strange phrases and bizarre tales of the seamier side of sport.

The future is opaque but with Michelle and Erik de Bruin, so is much of the past.