A large hedge of thorns soon grew around the palace, and every year it became higher and thicker, till at last the whole palace was surrounded and hid, so that not even roof or the chimneys could be seen. But there went a report through all the land of the beautiful sleeping Rose-Bud (for so was the king’s daughter called); so that from time to time several kings’ sons came, and tried to break through the thicket into the palace. This they could never do; for the thorns and bushes laid hold of them as it were with hands, and they stuck fast and died miserably.
The bleedin’ obvious gets a bad rub sometimes, actually most times, but as conversation starters go it’s in the Premier League. Take Wednesday. I’m sitting having lunch with my eyes on my phone and my fork in a quiche when two buckos walk in and spot me at a table.
We’re nine miles from Kilkenny Castle, a small café in the village of Stonyford.
“You’re not in Tokyo,” they chime.
You had to laugh.
Anyway, it got us going and it turned out — small world — that I’d met one of them before:
“The World Cup in 1990,” he said.
“Really?”
“You wrote about me.”
“Oh Christ!”
“You called me a ‘born again fan’ because I went home after the group games and came back for the quarter-final. I was bullin’!”
“Sorry about that,” I laughed.
They were shown to a table and I asked where they were from.
“Just down the road,” they said. “Kells.”
“Ahh, okay,” I replied, as if it was only vaguely familiar to me.
But I could see they weren’t fooled as I bade them farewell.
It was Kells that had brought me from Dublin that morning.
Twenty-five years earlier, on the evening of July 26, 1996, I’d sat in the main press centre of the Atlanta Olympic Games writing about a bomb that had just exploded close to the building, and about the questions being asked of Michelle Smith in the week she had become the greatest Irish sportstar of all time.
The story about the bomb — ‘Sport didn’t seem that important any more’ — made the front page that Sunday but was hardly mentioned. The story about the swimmer — ‘Shadow of a Scandal’ — provoked a debate that would last two years until the morning of January 10, 1998, when a car left Dublin bound for Kilkenny.
It was cold and still dark when Al and Kay Guy arrived at Kellsgrange House, the five-bedroom period residence on the outskirts of the village that was home to Michelle Smith. The middle-aged Dublin couple had been instructed by IDTM, a testing agency contracted to FINA, swimming’s world governing body, to collect a urine sample from Ireland’s triple Olympic champion.
It wasn’t the Guys’ first trip to Kilkenny that week. Two days previously they had failed to locate the swimmer at either her home in Kells or the local pool where she trained. So they were instructed to try again:
“As you see on Michelle’s training schedule, she is scheduled to train between 8-10 on Saturday morning,” Veronica Lyckow advised. “I would appreciate if you could go to her home first, and be there about 8.0, and if she is not there, you proceed to her training place.”
It wasn’t Al’s nature to be late.
Here’s a snippet from the statement he would later provide to a Tribunal:
“On 10th January 1998 we arrived at Ms De Bruin’s residence at 07:40. It was a dark morning and the gates were, again, chained, but this time padlocked from the inside. We parked our car in front of the gates, just off the road and waited. The house was in darkness. At about 07:50 a light came on upstairs in the house. I got out of the car and went to the side of the gate from where I could see down to the house.
“As I did so, I saw Ms De Bruin at the corner of the house walking from the kitchen door towards her silver Lexus car. She was wearing a dark, baggy fleece top and lighter coloured legging-type bottoms. At that stage I do not think that she had noted my presence. I called out to her, ‘Good Morning’ and she turned abruptly, as if surprised, and approached the gate.
“She did not appear to recognise me until she drew close to the gate. I greeted her and informed her that we “needed a test”. She turned away from the gate in the direction of the house and I called to her. I asked her to open the gate and requested her permission to park our car in her driveway.
“She unlocked the padlock and indicated that we could bring our car into the driveway. I unwound the chain and opened both gates. Kay then reversed the car out into the road and drove into the driveway. Meanwhile, Ms de Bruin had re-entered the house and had disappeared from view. I walked up to the kitchen door, which was ajar.
“I could see from there that Ms de Bruin was neither in the kitchen, nor in the corridor which led from it. I waited outside as I do not believe in entering anyone’s property unless asked. Kay proceeded to unload the testing equipment from behind the driver’s seat of the car. We both waited at the kitchen door for a while.
“Kay went to the front door to see if Ms de Bruin was expecting us there, or had left it open. She found it still locked and walked back and waited with me. After a short while she decided to have another look at the front door. Upon her return, Ms de Bruin appeared in the kitchen in the same clothing and I entered the kitchen and presented her with the Collection Order.
“Kay then brought in the sampling equipment which she placed on the table, around which we then sat. Ms de Bruin then commented that it was a pity we had not arrived earlier because she had just been to the toilet. She also mentioned that she had to pick someone up from Dublin airport that morning.
“Whilst we sat around the table, Ms de Bruin mixed herself a drink which she sipped from time to time. She made no attempt to provide a sample, which I did not think was unusual as she had told us that she had just been to the toilet. After about 15 to 20 minutes her husband, Mr Erik de Bruin, came into the kitchen dressed in a light tracksuit and flip-flops.
“He gave the appearance of having just got out of bed and I commented flippantly that he was ‘just out of the scratcher’. He scratched his head jokingly. This was the first time I had seen him that morning. He and Ms de Bruin then spoke for a while in Dutch, which Kay later told me she found rather rude.
“About ten minutes after her husband’s arrival, some 25 minutes after we had entered the kitchen, Ms de Bruin indicated that she was ready to try to give a sample. She selected a beaker from the table and went with Kay into the small toilet just off the kitchen under the stairs.”
The bottom line on what happened next, and the four-year ban the swimmer received when it was determined she had spiked the sample with alcohol, still causes confusion.
Take Anton Savage on The Last Word last week: “She was found to have tampered with a urine sample — she wasn’t found to be using drugs, but the sample was found to have been tampered with.”
Take Matt Cooper on the same show: “They couldn’t find the drugs in the sample they felt might have been there because there was so much whiskey in the urine.”
But it’s there in black and white if they bothered to check the archives. The banned substance — a testosterone precursor and a drug of choice for cheats — was androstenedione. It had shown up in three of Michelle de Bruin’s samples from November 1997 to March 1998.
But it was Michelle Smith that had brought me to Kells.
It was the 25th anniversary of her triumph in Atlanta but there was no bunting in the streets or bonfires in the fields. Who was she? Where was she? What had become of the girl who loved to swim? I had sent a couple of emails but she hadn’t replied. “I haven’t laid eyes on her for years,” a local announced. “Her husband used to drop the kids to the bus for school, but I haven’t seen him either.”
He gave me directions to Kellsgrange House.
I drove by twice before finding it. It was hidden behind some huge Leylandii trees and looked very different to the old photos from ’98. I paused for a moment outside the famous rusty gates and decided to drive on. She’s here. Somewhere.
Coming Soon: In Search of Michelle Smith