I'LL be frank. What I know about sport would fit on one corner of the back of Shaquille O'Neal's £115 million pay cheque (he is in the Olympics, isn't he?). But I have these vague memories of - eh, let's see Mark Spitz, Stephen Roche, Michael Carruth, people like that, and the huge fuss when they won things. I might be abysmally ignorant, but didn't Stephen Roche win the tour of Italy, the Tour de France and the world championships in a single year? Now that had all the makings of a modern fairytale, in the best, old fashioned sense of the word, but I don't recall anyone saying it at the time.
So tell me a story before I go to bed - is it only a fairytale when it happens to a woman?
No, I don't know much about sport but when Michelle Smith disbelievingly touched the wall for Olympic gold last Sunday morning, I had a flash back. It was early January 1995, on a treacherously icy day in Rotterdam. I'd been assigned to interview this Irish swimmer (maybe the sports journalists were still on their Christmas holidays) and all I knew about her was that she had just returned from Hong Kong with a serious fistful of medals.
She lived in a place called Hardinxveld, about 30 minutes out of the unlovely city of Rotterdam across brain numbingly flat, slushy tillage land that stretched remorselessly away to the horizon. Somewhere among a thousand similar anonymous housing developments, we finally found hers.
First impressions as we went inside? If this is how world class swimmers get to live, I thought, then I'll stick with journalism, thanks.
Basically, it was a transit camp. The tiny rented house she shared with Erik de Bruin, her Dutch coach and fiance, added up to little more than a soulless sparsely furnished, training base dominated by a huge television screen. At the time just 18 months ago, remember - she was living on a grant of £7,500 from Cospoir. She hadn't a single sponsor. When the Irish Amateur Swimming Association (IASA) refused to fund her airfares to Hong Kong, she had to pay for them herself and of course there wasn't enough in the kitty to buy a ticket for Erik.
So, in Hong Kong, when they called out "Michelle Smith, Ireland" (four times - three for gold and one for silver), and she climbed the winner's rostrum, the only person cheering for her and Ireland was her Filipino friend from the University of Houston who just happened to be in the city at the time.
Now, fast forward to last Tuesday at 12.33 a.m. At 3 a.m. the previous day, Irish officials were still arguing Michelle Smith's right to swim in the 400 metres freestyle; 17 hours later, she had won her second gold medal in three days. Red eyed with tiredness, strung out with emotion, but not (repeat, not) unduly surprised, Rathcoole and a fair slice of the Irish nation shot effortlessly into carnival mode.
All the old "Ole" ingredients were there. We quelled lumps in the throat while watching endless re runs of Michelle singing along to Amhran na bhFiann during those fantastic flag raising ceremonies, cringed while the hapless Smith sisters struggled gallantly, hopelessly, for new superlatives to describe their extraordinary sister and in the privacy of our own homes, loudly praised the Lord and Margaret Heffernan when we heard Heffernan was offering to ship them all out of the country and off to Atlanta.
THROUGHOUT the nation, there was a brief pause to register the verbal hand grenade hurled way up towards Smith by Janet Evans; another for a spot of domestic bickering; time out to note Smith's smiling, steely serenity at the press conference and well, back to champagne and cider time really, because then we indulged in a bit of harmless, hysterical schadenfteude to hear that surrounding NBC's prime time television coverage of the swimming race were advertisements for a truck endorsed by a person who had missed out on the final. That person, we learned in chortling disbelief, was Janet Evans. Listen, does it get any better than this?
Michelle Smith said something interesting: "When it comes down to it, I'm a fighter. If people put obstacles in my way, it just makes me more determined." Crikey. What could she mean? Well, we know now what she meant. The woman who only 18 months ago, had just a single friend at the World Cup in Hong Kong and none from her native country, has the world in a heap. She has calmed the ravening interrogators, has carved an indelible pitch for herself in Irish sport and Olympic history, flaunted our native language before a few billion viewers and most incredibly of all has done it by swimming.
You've heard all the Olympic Irish jokes? No? The one about catching the javelin? Or the one about the men who tried to get in carrying two planks and a roll of wire? They said they were the Irish fencing team. Or the one about the reporter who was asked how the Irish swimming team got on at the Olympics? "Great", he said happily, no one drowned." Well, begorra, we have them now.
MICHELLE Smith has turned the world upside down and left the Americans squealing (amazed no doubt, to find themselves on the junior side of the relationship for once) and the BBC practically adopting our Michelle: Sharron Davies remarked at one point that "Michelle brought us back a gold". Yep, she's worth adopting - but lest they forget, when her finances were at a crushing ebb and she cut a lonely figure in her native country, Michelle Smith eschewed the substantial blandishments of the Dutch national team in favour of sticking with the Irish. Sorry Sharron. After all that, she's hardly likely to defect to the British now, unless it's to your job with the BBC (she's very bright and came within an ace of a communications degree, you know). But why, I'd like to know, is everyone so surprised? Anyone - even the most criminally ignorant - who bothered to flash a glance in her direction in the past two years must have had an inkling of what this fiercely dogged woman could deliver.
And long before that.
Michelle Smith was never going to go out with whimper. She was 15 when my colleague Lorna Siggins first interviewed her and she gave her contact number as the telephone at the King's Hospital swimming pool. But she was only 10 when she first developed a hunger for gold. When she came home without a medal from the National Community Games, she cried her eyes out and made a promise through her tears; she would never let herself be
Continued on Weekend 3
