Someone needs to talk about Michelle. How much longer can her Olympic medal history remain so conveniently muted, now that the whole world is open to rewriting record books and redistributing sabotaged medals to their rightful owners, and even we find ourselves trying to tally up how many more we’re either now due or were once robbed of.
That’s a sentence, not a question.
Especially after all the talk this week of how soon Rob Heffernan will get his bronze medal from the 50km walk, from the 2012 London Olympics, having originally finished fourth. It will hardly be ideal timing, from both the emotional and commercial sense, although it's clearly another case of better late than never.
Indeed it's one of the strongest cases made by this week's revelations of the Independent Commission report into the essentially endemic doping practices in Russia. Of all the evidence contained in Dick Pound's report, it's irrefutably clear that Sergei Kirdyapkin, the Russian who won the 50km walk gold medal in London, shouldn't have been anywhere near those Olympics. He'd been reported for an adverse doping finding the year before, yet thanks to some neat cover-up and some very dodgy testing, Kirdyapkin was allowed to compete anyway. The rest could have been Olympic history, only for a few brave whistleblowers and a cunning German journalist.
Of course Heffernan is not alone. It’s been strangely refreshing to read the stories of several other athletes in line for medal upgrades in light of the Russian doping scandal – such as the American 800m runner Alysia Montaño, who is now due a silver medal from the 2010 World Indoor championships, and bronze medals from the 2011 and 2013 World championships, plus the 2012 Olympics, having also originally finished fourth by a drug-fuelled Russian.
‘Move forward’
“I never lost hope that I’d one day get these medals,” Montaño told
Sports Illustrated
. “I definitely tried not to hang onto it, because it would make it impossible for me to move forward. But when you’re cheated out of a medal and you know it, it eats at you internally . . . the Olympics are huge and you think that’s your shot and then you miss. You blame yourself and think, ‘What can I do differently’.”
So Heffernan finds himself on the verge of winning what will be only the 29th Irish medal in Olympic history, and yet he too admits he's not hanging onto it yet. Part of that hesitation is the suspicion that Irish athletes have been denied Olympic medals in the past because of doping, possibly Sonia O'Sullivan, definitely Eamonn Coghlan. Heffernan can't afford to feel that London medal until it's actually around his neck.
Now, next summer, comes the 20th anniversary of Michelle de Bruin’s superhuman feat at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, and yet once again her three swimming gold medals and one bronze will be celebrated by our convenient muteness, despite all our loud talk this week against Russian athletes sabotaging our own.
Indeed there is hardly any talk or sight or lasting evidence of de Bruin’s medals anymore, unless crippling curiosity drove you to places like the Poitín Stil. Or to the hallowed walls of the Olympic Council of Ireland, and the large wooden medal board that hangs in the most prominent position that their office allows.
That’s strange because Ireland used to take great pride in all its Olympic medallists, and rightly so: before de Bruin came along we’d only ever won 15 medals, in 72 years of trying. We’d never won any medals in swimming, nor were we ever expected too, at least not when those good old days in the pool meant no one had drowned.
Indeed in July of 1996 we still didn't have even one Olympic-sized swimming pool, and although there were some hints, and plenty of rumours, that de Bruin might just do something special, no one ever expected her to win more individual gold medals at those Atlanta Olympics than any other athlete from any nation, in any sport. By the end of the seven days of swimming, only the mighty Americans and Russians topped tiny Ireland on the overall swimming medal table.
Imagine that happening in Rio. And de Bruin had done it all with single-handed boldness that would have amazed even Dawn Fraser: gold, starting in the 400m individual medley; followed by the 400m freestyle (an event she’d never swum internationally before); then the 200m individual medley; and not forgetting her bronze, in the 200m butterfly – ending what de Bruin neatly surmised as “the best week of my life”.
Except that feeling, as everyone now knows, wasn’t to last: whatever ripples of suspicion de Bruin left behind in the pool in Atlanta became a international splash less than two years later, after Al and Kay Guy – the doyens of Irish drug testing – showed up at her home in Kilkenny, on January 10th, 1998. A few months later de Bruin’s sample was revealed to contain a level of alcohol that would have been fatal if consumed by a human.
It was also revealed her sample had contained androstenedione, a metabolic precursor of testosterone, and well-known performance-enhancing drug, although FINA – the international swimming federation – pressed for the more clear-cut charge of sample tampering, which also carried the higher punishment of a four-year ban. So, at age 28, de Bruin’s career was over, although not, strictly speaking, for using any performance enhancing drugs.
‘Sudden improvement’
It didn’t help de Bruin’s case that at age 26, in Atlanta, she was considered by elite international swimming standards to be entitled to a pension, not a sudden improvement. Nor was her reputation helped by the fact she was coached by her husband Eric de Bruin, still the Dutch discus record holder, who at the time was serving a four-year ban for excess levels of testosterone.
Still, nearly 20 years on, might be there anyone left to explain why those four Olympic medals aren’t being celebrated? That is a question, not a sentence.
