The campaign to free the Kilkenny One goes on unabated. Last week's wheeze, which quite caught the imaginations of RTE folk and some print journalists alike, was the resurrection of the grand conspiracy theory which we have come to know and love.

So breathlessly received was the news of the kettle-and-the-canister received in some quarters that the sports editor of the Irish Independent selected himself as Wally of the Week for not having believed in the conspiracy argument sooner.

It doesn't fall to us to interfere with one man's moment of self-revelation, but last week's news that a club-mate of Paul Edwards had boiled up a Versapak testing kit won't have caused many Pauline conversions among those who have been following the case closely. "Red herrings on special offer" said one such expert sagely last Wednesday. He won't be called to the wally pantheon any time soon.

Firstly, the kettle trick is old news. Observers of the international media will have noticed that the world didn't quake last week when the news emerged. Testing wasn't thrown into chaos. Hundreds of banned athletes didn't throw off their shackles.

Old news. Perhaps it has never been performed on video before and done in the record time suggested by the Edwards team, but the story has been out there for some time. Indeed, speaking to this newspaper last August after announcing the four-year ban on Michelle de Bruin, two of the three lawyers who considered her case, Bernard Favaro and Harm Beyer, agreed that they had accepted the kettle theory as a viable scenario, just as they had accepted Peter Lennon's suggestion that the burden of proof lay with them.

That was then and this is now, however, and the stakes get higher with each passing week. Peter Lennon, who stood on the steps of the Lausanne palace and told journalists that the FINA summer hearing had been "fair and cordial", could be heard last week on Liveline saying just the opposite. With the weeks ticking down to the final CAS hearing in Lausanne in early May, Peter will have viewed last week's little media foray as little more than a few minutes of light distraction. The case will be decided by three lawyers, not by public referendum, and as such the prospects are little altered by what emerged from London. Peter Lennon knows this well.

In short, the FINA case is this: Michelle de Bruin, by her admission, was missing from the sight of Al and Kay Guy for a short period of time when they called to her house in January 1998. Al and Kay Guy noted a whiskey odour during the time they were in the house. FINA point out that Michelle de Bruin signed to the effect that everything was in order with the samples on January 10th, 1998, and that Peter Lennon did likewise in relation to the B sample on May 21st in Barcelona. They deduce, therefore, that according merely to the evidence of the de Bruin team that the alcohol reached the jar in the house in Kells.

The whiskey odour suggests a couple of possible scenarios. The athlete may have been using a catheter, which she stored in alcohol to avoid infection, and the hastily inserted catheter leaked a lot of alcohol into the sample.

Alternatively, perhaps some alcoholic substance was surreptitiously added to the sample in a panicky attempt to queer the pitch. Just theories.

FINA feel they have motive and opportunity and are happy that their "process of elimination" approach to the case is legally safe.

Peter Lennon's case is more of a leap, but he has articulated it volubly and with such steady conviction that one's admiration for the man increases with every exposure to his splendid grandiloquence.

Wisely, Peter avoids naming those he thinks might have tampered with Michelle de Bruin's sample. But if we wish to use a process of elimination we can guess who he is talking about. Peter Lennon says he has no need to ascribe motive to the party who may have tampered with the sample, merely opportunity. Legally he is probably right, even if such a tactic is scarcely the breath of life for his client's reputation.

Anyway, the person or persons alleged to have interfered with the sample had quite a job. Peter Lennon says that, despite the weighty nature of his brief, he has been unable to get his hands on a Versapak doping test kit to try the boiling experiment on it. The perpetrator would need to be a person who could get their hands on several kits with which to practice their art before the big day came.

On that day, having gotten their mitts on Michelle de Bruin's sample, they would have been required to do the following: to breach all the tiers of security in which the sample was wrapped and, at immense risk to their reputation, boil up two plastic canisters hoping that they would both break open in a manner which is undetectable, that nothing would warp and that the glass beakers inside wouldn't crack or shatter or that the proteins in the urine would defy science and refuse to denature and congeal when boiled in water.

Having done all this, the person would be left with the two little containers of hot urine in front of him or her. Having planned everything absolutely perfectly, one would have thought that the criminal mastermind would have taken the trouble to metabolise a little banned steroid, thus enabling himself or herself to drop a little into the crystal-pure urine of Michelle de Bruin.

Instead, he or she scratches his/her head, moves to the bar in the living room, opens a bottle of liquor and happily pours a capful in before gluing down the lids on the A and B sample canisters again, sealing up everything in the tiers of security and sending it off to the laboratory, which obligingly would notice nothing.

For a person who has always dispassionately done his/her unglamorous job for the betterment of sport, this would represent quite a turn of character. It suggests a conspiracy involving the world's top drug agency and the world swimming authority, both prepared to lay their existence on the line to discredit a swimmer for no better reason, she suggests, than that she "is married to this man".

Or perhaps it was somebody further down the chain who did the tampering. A courier getting lucky on his guess as to the serial number and getting a chance to employ his unlikely expertise. Or an employee in the IOC laboratory in Barcelona, a scenario which suggests a conspiracy riding across the top level of the Olympic movement.

Perhaps in the end there will be a loophole through which Michelle de Bruin will happily slip. Good luck to her. We haven't seen the loophole yet, though.