LIKE all good fairytales, the story of the woman from Rathcoole, Co Dublin, who went to the Olympic Games and won three gold medals and a bronze, is, steeped in mystery. How did Rapunzel bear the weight of that strapping prince without the hair being torn from her head? How does Cinderella explain her transformation from filthy urchin to glamorous princess, using only a pumpkin and a few mice?
Before, during and after Michelle Smith's Olympic swimming triumphs, questions were asked - by other swimmers, coaches and journalists - about the rate of her improvement as an international swimmer. Swimming against the tide of accepted wisdom, over the past four years she has improved dramatically - rising from 26th place in the 400 metre individual medley in Barcelona in 1992 to well, first place in the same event" in Atlanta in 1996.
That wasn't meant to happen, they said. Youth was always an asset in the pool; the leanness of pre pubescence helped teenage women swimmers to cut a swathe, through the water. Smith's progress at an age when the majority of women swimmers had long since hung up their goggles just didn't make sense.
How little sense it made could be seen in the reaction of the American media to her victories in Atlanta. Drugs, they whispered drugs, they implied drugs?, they finally asked her. "Can you answer in one word, `yes' or `no', if you have ever taken any form of performance enhancing drugs?" one American journalist inquired. The answer was a resounding "No".
Gold - A Triple Champion's Story, by Michelle Smith and the editor of the Title, Cathal Dervan, devotes its penultimate chapter to the subject of performance enhancing drugs. Much of it is dedicated to explaining the controversy surrounding Smith's "boyfriend turned coach turned husband", Erik de Bruin, who was banned from competitive athletics following a positive "dope test" in August 1993, a result he has always contested.
Dc Bruin's comments, freely given to Dervan, we must assume, do little to endear you to the man. Manfred Donike, the German official who performed the drug test on de Bruin, died of a heart attack on board an aeroplane on the day Smith won her first gold medal at the European Championship's in 1995. "When Erik was told the news 24 hours later, he said it gave him double reason to celebrate. Callous as it sounded, he meant it; he still means it."
Going to the Atlanta Games, Smith knew, we are told, that "someone would ask her about her elevation to world class standard; she knew that some doubting Thomas would question her husband's case history". Yet no one in her camp deigned to let the outside world in far enough to let it be seen that her training methods alone were enough to elicit such impressive improvements.
Of those Irish journalists who" questioned her amazing performances in the Olympic pool, Smith says: "All of a sudden they were all experts on swimming and privy to `inside information' about my life, coaching, and my preparation - which is impossible because nobody in Ireland knows how I train."
Post triumph biographies offer a golden opportunity to put the record straight, to move that one step nearer to the heart of a nation. Unfortunately, Dervan's and Smith's book misses the mark.
The transparency which might have put paid to all the innuendo once and for all is just not there. If more time had been invested in openness, instead of vilifying opponents like Janet Evans, the former darling of American swimming who dared to raise her eyebrows when asked by the press about Smith's achievements, the authors might have produced a book that did justice to the greatest of Irish woman athletes. {CORRECTION} 96111800003
