February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Mark Jones
DUBLIN — Not one, but three urine samples provided by former triple Olympic gold medalist Michelle Smith de Bruin showed signs of a banned substance, the Court of Arbitration for Sport heard in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Tuesday.
During two long days of painstaking evidence, CAS heard De Bruin’s appeal against her four-year ban from swimming for tampering with a drugs test in 1998. The court’s findings could be made public on Friday.
Dr. Jordi Segura testified that three urine samples taken from De Bruin between November 1997 and March 1998 contained concentrations of the banned testosterone precursor, androstenedione.
De Bruin’s sample of January 1998, which is at the heart of the tampering case, had a higher concentration of the drug than the other samples. De Segura, whose Barcelona laboratory carried out the analyses, said he believed that the swimmer had taken the drug sometime during the previous 10 to 12 hours before being tested at her home in Kilkenny, Ireland.
Initially, Dr. Segura recommended that FINA, swimming’s world governing body, should not charge De Bruin with using a banned substance, as he was unable to identify the specific brand of testosterone precursor. However, he said the evidence supported a charge of tampering. Soon afterward, new technology had enabled him to identify the drug exactly.
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De Bruin’s solicitor, Peter Lennon, objected strenuously to Segura’s evidence, saying his client had never been charged with having had a positive test, only with tampering. But lawyers for FINA responded that the presence of a testosterone precursor was used to support the charge of tampering.
At that point in the hearing, the FINA lawyers both said, almost simultaneously, the word "androstenedione." Known as andro among athletes, the drug was at the center of a public debate last year when Mark McGwire broke baseball’s home-run record while taking the substance. Andro is banned by the International Olympic Committee but not by Major League Baseball.
During her own testimony, De Bruin, who stunned the swimming world with her three gold medals at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, said at the time of the doping control she had been out of sight of the testers for "less than a minute."
The testers, an Irish couple, Al and Kay Guy, had been adamant they both smelled a whiskey-like odor in De Bruin’s kitchen after the test had been completed. However, in evidence, De Bruin said she had no whiskey in the house.
But Al Guy countered with his own evidence, which put De Bruin’s absence at between "four to six minutes, conservatively." Asked why he did not challenge the swimmer there and then over the whiskey-like smell, Guy said that he and his wife weren’t sure what they had smelled until they discussed the matter later.