For many who have watched her tumultuous career, Michelle de Bruin's ultimate exit from the pool had a touch of inevitability about it. The controversy which trailed her since she transformed herself from obscure also-swam to triple Olympic gold medallist in Atlanta in 1996 set her on a crash course.

The decision to continue swimming and to continue insisting on her innocence was a high-risk strategy for which she has ultimately paid the price.

The signs were there. Within Irish swimming the change in the shape and form of the swimmer had been remarked upon from 1994 onwards when after a brief retirement following the Barcelona Olympics, she re-emerged and began shattering Irish records every time she dipped a red-painted toe nail into the pool.

By then she was already playing a high-stakes game with the swimming authorities.

In April of 1996, de Bruin had been required to fill out the standard form indicating where her training facilities would be for the three months leading up to the Olympics. De Bruin stated baldly that she didn't know where she would be. Red flags went up.

In January of 1997, FINA (the governing body of world swimming) again contacted de Bruin and the IASA (her domestic federation) to complain about her unavailability for a random drugs test in Celbridge the previous October. FINA also complained about the vagueness of details supplied by de Bruin regarding her training schedules for the first three months of 1997.

FINA had also written over a year previously concerning de Bruin's unavailability for random drug tests in the first three-quarters of 1995 during which she had missed another test. When questions about these forms and letters were put to de Bruin in the course of her cross examination in the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne last month, she replied calmly: "That is not correct."

Technically she may have been right, the letters were sent to the IASA and then onto her, but as the three-man judging panel leafed through the documentary evidence, de Bruin's combative attitude will have done her little good.

The difficulties with the concept of random testing which de Bruin seemed to struggle with echoed those expressed by her husband and mentor Erik de Bruin when the concept was first suggested in the late 1980s. He went on the record in the De Volkraant newspaper in Holland saying that he found the idea to be a gross invasion of his privacy and wondered if he might need a lawyer to protect him from such intrusion. The swimmer's attitude also foreshadowed the manner in which her career would end. A knock on the door from two testers early one morning.

Before that there were to be further difficulties however. On Monday, February 3rd, 1997, de Bruin narrowly missed another test when a FINA testing team called to a house in Celbridge at which she had been staying. Technically, having been cited twice for missed tests, she then became eligible for a ban.

On Friday, February 23rd, 1997, the FINA executive met in Lausanne to discuss de Bruin's case and to examine the legality of the very rule which FINA congress had toughened up in Atlanta the previous summer.

Aware of an anomaly in the rule concerning swimmers who missed random drug tests, FINA moved to bring the punishment for missing tests into line with that which existed for refusals to be tested or positive tests.

The two-year ban for missing three random tests was therefore doubled to four years, with a proviso (if deemed appropriate) allowing FINA to strip the swimmer of all medals and records achieved within the previous 12 months.

By late in February, FINA were considering the legal ramifications of imposing such a sanction on an Olympic champion swimmer. Following the warning sent to the IASA and de Bruin in January 1997, the fact that the swimmer had missed another random test on February 3rd when testers from IDTM (the Swedish agency which tests on behalf of FINA) called to the Celbridge house of a well-known Irish discus thrower with whose family Erik and Michelle de Bruin were staying, made her technically eligible for a ban.

Michelle de Bruin had spent some time the previous week staying in the Berkeley Court Hotel but had checked out on the Friday morning to spend the weekend in Kildare before returning to Dublin to accept a Texaco award at a reception in the Burlington Hotel on Monday, February 3rd. She checked into the Burlington at some time after 5.00 p.m. The tester called to the Celbridge house within an hour of her having left for Dublin.

When the FINA executive gathered in Lausanne later that month they were concerned that the gap between de Bruin's stated time of departure and the testing teams' stated time of arrival was too small to withstand the legal challenge which would inevitably follow such a landmark case.

It was decided in Lausanne that there were difficulties in proceeding with an action against de Bruin if it were to hinge exclusively on the missed test of February 3rd, 1997.

FINA had decided that the legal dimensions of their own rule book would be placed under particular scrutiny and, as such, they convened a meeting of their own medical and doping commissions for the following Wednesday afternoon to investigate the issue further.

The meeting the following Wednesday was attended by Gunnar Werner, the Swedish lawyer who acts as honorary secretary to FINA, Harm Beyer, a Hamburg magistrate and the chair of the doping commission, Dr James Taffy Cameron, an English doctor and honorary secretary of the medical commission, as well as Cornel Marculescu, the Romanian executive director of FINA.

The meeting began around midday and dragged on for seven hours and was ultimately inconclusive. Two representatives f IDTM, the Swedish drug testing agency, were present to give their account of the missed test of February 3rd. A decision was finally taken not to proceed at that stage with suspending de Bruin. Another warning letter was sent to the swimmer.

This caution has marked all FINA's dealings with the swimmer during the period of her greatest prominence. Last month, the Court of Arbitration in Lausanne heard how Al and Kay Guy had registered another missed test early in January of 1998 but had been advised that rather than recording it as a no-show they were to present themselves at the swimmer's house again two days later.

The events of that morning, January 10th, 1998, have been analysed and dissected by media and more importantly by lawyers ever since.