The case for the defence was presented with the sort of vigour which we have come to expect. From the time of her first press conference in Atlanta, Michelle de Bruin has been a cool and determined performer.
And so the debate rages on, all the time getting more and more bogged down in the technical details which fewer and fewer people will bother to wade through.
Yesterday morning back in the offices of Lennon, Heather and Co on the quays in Dublin the atmosphere was heavy with expectation. It was as if FINA's statement of Thursday which banned the athlete was being held in suspense until the other side was heard.
But three lawyers listened two weeks ago to all the arguments detailed yesterday and still found Michelle de Bruin guilty. We lesser mortals were left to make more instant decisions.
That made the occasion no less tense. Both Michelle de Bruin and Peter Lennon gave an hour's worth of their best stuff yesterday, some of it relevant, some of it not easy to digest.
Every day the landscape of this case seems to alter considerably, and one suspects that it will be viewed adequately and clearly only from a distance.
Yesterday's vista was of a conspiracy or vendetta which had been entered into. The notion involved the possibility of two testers, the world's leading drug testing agency, the IOC's leading laboratory and the world swimming authorities all being involved in a plan the livelihood of one swimmer. Their motivation? "Because I am married to this man."
It unfolds this way. Having opened Michelle de Bruin's drug test sample by placing the canisters in boiling water for fifteen minutes (without apparently damaging the glass container inside the canister or the sample inside it) the committee in charge of the conspiracy opted not to drop in a miniscule dose of Stanozolol but chose of all things, a wee dram of whiskey.
That is the idea which we must all get our heads around. It is probably true that Dr Jordi Segura of the Barcelona laboratory accepted that whiskey was not a masking agent. Nobody ever contended that it was. It was alleged to be a tampering agent, designed to queer the pitch. True also that the laboratory test which showed traces of testosterone precursor in the sample (the De Bruin team disclosed this last April 29th) was a test not yet approved.
From these elements the De Bruin team has drawn an extraordinary syllogism. Whiskey is not a masking agent. No current test has found a banned substance. Therefore Michelle de Bruin had no motivation for tampering with her own sample.
This sort of thing is all part of the trouble with these proceedings.
When all the words which were expended yesterday are boiled down, the case presents us with several key questions. They mainly concern the manner in which all these issues are dealt with by sporting authorities. The secrecy which has surrounded the hearings and investigations permits the atmosphere of boiling rage, flying accusations and counteraccusations to exist.
In the aftermath of yesterday's press conference, much debate took place about whether or not, on the basis of what we heard, Michelle de Bruin would have been convicted in a court of law. We don't know, but in a court of law the evidence would have been publicly given and publicly heard. What we are left with is pages of duelling press releases.
When they proceed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland we can assume that the basis of the de Bruin team's case will be a resounding reiteration of the case made yesterday. On the surface it is appealing in its complexity, creating a maze of uncertainties and blind alleys. At the centre of the controversy were the two sampling officers, Al and Kay Guy, who, for the privilege of doing their job, received quite a buffeting yesterday. The de Bruin team said that the FINA doping panel had agreed to disregard the evidence of the Guys. The Guys can have no comeback to this.
If FINA did so decide this was a remarkable concession for Peter Lennon to have won, but it is essential to note that even having allegedly laid aside the evidence of Mr and Mrs Guy, the FINA panel found Michelle de Bruin guilty and explicitly ruled the Guys out as the perpetrators of the manipulation.
The subsidiary evidence related to Peter Lennon's suggestion that his investigations had led him to an old website which included the information that the plastic canisters in the Versapak doping control pack used to take the sample could be opened by placing them in boiling water for 15 to 20 minutes. The World Wide Web has many such sites, , but the revelation hardly amounts to conclusive evidence.
Certainly if the FINA doping panel and Dr Segura (head of the IOC's Barcelona lab) accepted that Mr Lennon had found such a site and was positing such a theory, there has been no sign of the mass withdrawal of Versapak kits from testers around the world. Dr Don Catlin, head of the IOC laboratory in Los Angeles and perhaps the world's leading expert on doping, is sceptical about the claims.
"So let's see," he said last night. "You get the external plastic container inside of which is a glass bottle, you put this into hot water and then you can pop it, open the bottle, break the seal, somehow or other get the top back on it and put it back in the bag.
"I can say there are always rumours or anecdotes that people have been able to break the system. It has never been demonstrated for me. I've not seen it. I hear the rumours. The external bag was once demonstrated [in the Butch Reynolds case] to be breachable but that was a few years ago and the company which makes them altered it.
"Inside, when you finally get to the bottle you have a security system in the bottle itself. The cap is not only tightly closed but there is a tape on top of it which would have to be broken and destroyed. That should be evident when you open the A bottle. Anything that happens to the bottles has to be done to the A bottle and the B bottle."
We know that on May 21st Peter Lennon and a laboratory technician travelled to the IOC laboratory in Barcelona to be present for the opening of the B sample of Michelle de Bruin's test. If they noticed any signs of boiling, breaching or tampering they haven't told us about them yet. It is one thing to find a website which states that something can be done. Another to prove that the apparatus of drug-testing worldwide is so easily breachable.
"The story I have heard is microwave, that under certain conditions it might be possible in a microwave to get into the plastic outside container, which is really pretty heavy material," says Don Catlin. "I have never seen it done but I have heard that rumour. There are always lots and lots of rumours."
The specific gravity issue has also returned to haunt us all. The specific gravity of the sample when measured with a dipstick by Al Guy in Kellsgrange House on January 10th was 1.015. When measured by machine in Barcelona it was .983 .
The defence assertion is that the disparity in these specific gravity measurements indicates that the alcohol could not have been present during the dipstick test. Dr Don Catlin has a different view.
"The kind of dipsticks that are used are commercial dipsticks. I don't know that they have been tested in a situation where they have been dipped into something which contains alcohol. As I understand it, the story is that the alcohol was somehow in the sample at the time of the collection. "If alcohol is in the sample in which the dipstick is placed then I would have difficulty accepting the dipstick value because I'm sure the company that sells them hasn't tested them for being dipped into alcohol. That's where I would focus. A laboratory would have a variety of different means of measuring these things, all more sophisticated.
"I don't think it is especially relevant. It's relevant perhaps because in this situation every detail is relevant, because of the tension, but in the grand scheme of things we didn't put in the requirement of PH and specific gravity measurements on site for that reason. It is there so the crew know when they have a sample which is concentrated enough to send forward."
So the debate rages on, moving further and further towards the obscure suburbs of legal argument and scientific dispute. That's how it must be, and that's how it will be presented to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in a couple of months' time. There were several attempts to personalise the case yesterday. The stakes having got higher over the past few weeks the number of permitted moves seems to have been increased.
They should be resisted. The only participants who matter now are Michelle de Bruin and those whose job it is to sift and analyse the evidence. All the rest is just the noise of bullets in the public relations war.