So, where were you when you heard Michelle de Bruin's career was over this week? I was doing something I vowed when I was young I would never do: comparing the features in a range of hedge strimmers in my local DIY store. (So much for changing the world, eh?)

The news came on the radio blaring from the speakers in the "garden equipment" department. Everyone around me stopped what they were doing, looked up, wide-eyed, towards the nearest speaker and sighed heavy sighs when they heard that de Bruin had lost her appeal against a four-year ban. Dream over.

There was a collective shaking of heads and then we all returned to examining hedge strimmers. Life goes on.

But not, one imagines, for Michelle de Bruin. At least not as the revered winner of three Olympic gold medals.

For some there was probably just relief that it was all over, relief that the powers-that-be had found her guilty as charged. Relief because, all through this affair, they hoped her "achievements" in swimming truly warranted the suspicion with which they were greeted.

Why? Because if there's anything in sport harder to cope with than the thoughts of a cheat "getting away with it", it's the fear that the achievements of a genuinely brilliant athlete are doubted simply because we feel we can't trust any of them anymore.

I remember having a heated argument a few months' back with a sincere supporter of Michelle de Bruin, one who simply insisted she be regarded as innocent until conclusively proven guilty, and all we could agree on in the end was that we both hoped she was guilty. "Imagine if she was innocent?" We cringed at the horror of the thought. A genuine triple gold medal winner treated as she had been? It wasn't worth thinking about.

Only once was I in the presence of Michelle de Bruin, at an Olympic Council of Ireland conference on Women in Sport 18 months ago. When she arrived, with her husband Erik, at the hotel staging the conference she was greeted politely, but there was no warmth. She sensed it too, as I suspect she did wherever she went.

I'll admit it - I would normally go weak-kneed in the presence of a triple gold medal winner; even the sight of a single bronze medal winner would leave my jaw scraping the ground. But not that time, because no matter how hard I tried I could never truly believe in Michelle de Bruin's fairytale and, consequently, that evening, I didn't view her as a genuine triple gold medal winner. It seemed most of the people in that hotel felt the same way. Many of them had competed themselves at international level in various disciplines, and most confessed to finding de Bruin's dramatic rags-to-riches sporting tale hard to believe.

Just as I don't think many in this country believed the three unknown, "rags-to-riches", Chinese runners who beat Sonia O'Sullivan into fourth place in the 1993 World Championships' 3,000 metres final did so without the aid of banned substances. We felt for O'Sullivan then, felt she was cheated. But we were slow to feel the same for the likes of Allison Wagner, one of the women who came second to de Bruin in Atlanta, even though, I suspect, in our hearts, we felt she had suffered the same fate as Sonia O'Sullivan. Of course conclusive proof was needed to put an end to the de Bruin fairytale, but circumstantial evidence, it seemed, was enough to ensure that all she could ever receive were lukewarm, polite receptions wherever she went.

But, despite everything, despite her current predicament being nobody's fault but her own, I have sympathy for de Bruin now, not least because she's just 29 years of age and I wonder what the hell she's going to do with the rest of her life. Until 1992 she was someone to revere, as any athlete who dedicates their heart and soul to their sport deserves to be. In international terms she wasn't particularly successful, but that simply made her dedication to swimming all the more admirable. I could never understand how an athlete could cope with trailing in seventh or eighth in every race they ever ran or swam, knowing in their hearts they would never be rewarded with a medal for their efforts.

But Michelle Smith, as she was then, kept going until the Barcelona Olympics that year, giving it everything she had. She retired then; if only, if only she had left it at that.

But she didn't. She came back in late 1993 and was simply unrecognisable from the swimmer we knew before. Twenty-three Irish records broken in the space of 12 months? A triple Olympic gold winner in the summer of 1996? Such a transformation only happens in an athlete's dreams. But maybe she could no longer cope with trailing in seventh or eighth in every race she ever swam. If, this week, she had left no victims behind, perhaps de Bruin would elicit more sympathy. But reading and hearing Allison Wagner's story in this paper and on RTE Radio on Thursday hardened the heart.

"Thirty years from now, she will show her grandchildren her gold medal, I will show my grandchildren silver. She has those gold medals in her possession. She will always have gold and I will always have silver. It will always be that way forever," said Wagner, who should have left Atlanta as an Olympic gold medallist. Oh Michelle, there was no shame in trailing in seventh or eighth. Good luck to you, in whatever you choose to do.