Inge de Bruijn has business to do here. She strides through the cool clean corridors of the aquatic centre, her odd sunken eyes fixed on some spot in the middle distance, her arms stretched down her side so that her perfect fingernails are as near to the floor as they can be. Friends, admirers and journalists call out after her, "Inky, hey Inky." She never breaks stride.
She took the 100 metre butterfly title here on Sunday night, breaking the obligatory world record in the process. Since then she has been a woman in demand. There is a feeling that she won't be leaving here without more medals and more records. She is entered in three individual events, the 50 metre and 100 metre freestyle and the 100 metre butterfly, and she is the current world record holder in each. There'll be more medals and more questions for Inky.
It's been a jolly Olympics so far, with the boisterous, happy host nation finding plenty to please it in the pool. After the sourness and poison of Atlanta and beyond, there has been no appetite for drugs questions. The East Germans are history. The Chinese are ducking again. Michelle Smith (De Bruin) is a bad memory. Yet Inge de Bruijn moves with the wariness of a woman who knows that the conversation on drugs can go from zero to 60 miles an hour in seconds. As the possessor of the most remarkable set of improvements since Michelle met Erik, she keeps her eyes on the road.
She is a character, no doubt about it, easy to like and accessible to the media in environments where she has her hand on the controls. There have been lots of Inky photo opportunities over the past few months, and portraits of her handsome face can be found in most glossies dealing with the Games.
What's not to like? She has a raft of superstitions which apparently take up most of her race preparations. She has a bright yellow kickboard which she can't leave home without. She must have a manicure before she races. Her boyfriend is the Dutch swim guru Jacco Verhaeren. Like all good gurus he is inaccessible to the media here. The cameras lingered pointedly on the happy couple as they hugged forever at poolside on Sunday night. It was interesting to watch. Verhaeren kicked de Bruijn off the Dutch swim team back in 1996 after pronouncing her under-motivated. By then de Bruijn was 23 years old and in decline as a swimmer. She had blossomed briefly in the early 1990s and was a regular in the top 10 lists without threatening to displace anyone in the pantheon of European swimmers.
She had come from a swimming family. Her parents were both international water polo players and her twin sister Jakline has also played the sport for Holland, while her brother is currently on the Dutch water polo team.
Inky herself had a leisurely sabbatical in 1996, dropping out of competition before coming back rejuvenated by the tough love of her coach.
She apparently knuckled down to a new regime of work, found herself a second coach for the time she spends in the USA (most of the year) and embarked after a year out of competition on an odyssey of dramatic improvement which has led to the meteor shower of records which she has poured on swimming recently. She says that the Atlanta experience - or non experience - made her tougher mentally and that she has since overcome a debilitating nervousness when performing in front of large crowds. That and new training methods of course. Her methods (she claims weightlifting, rope climbing, martial arts and swimming with shoes on to be among them) have been called into question by Australian swimmer Susie O' Neill, who described de Bruijn's achievements as "pretty suss", and by several coaches who have whispered rather than shouted their doubts. There have been questions already at press conferences, polite requests to explain the difference between De Bruin and De Bruijn. She does so, pointing out that the Irish swimmer came from nowhere after her break from swimming, whereas de Bruijn had broken a series of European records before becoming disillusioned. She is not keen on the questions but accepts the necessity for them.
"I'm an emotional person and that really gets to me," she explains. "When the accusations started I just decided not to read newspapers. If you work hard and break records they just want to chop your head off and that's a sad thing. If you perform well you should be rewarded."
She says (as de Bruin did four years ago) that she was under-motivated before 1996. Then she turned on, tuned in and got wet.
Certainly the similarities between herself and Michelle de Bruin go beyond the similar surname. Her pattern of improvements after a break away from the sport is unusual. Over seven years from 1990 to 1995 she pared virtually nothing off her best 100 metre freestyle and butterfly times. Then from 1998 onwards she went crazy, knocking 2.8 seconds off her best 100 freestyle time 3.5 seconds off her best 100 butterfly time. The Australian sports magazine Inside Sport devoted two pages this month to comparing the improvement records of the two women. Their conclusion: "Quite frankly , it is disturbing to compare Michelle Smith's improvement with the path Inge de Bruijn has taken."
Whatever she is doing, you might want some of it too. Twenty seven years old, well past the traditional improvement area for a woman, and she has broken nine world records now since May. She sets off this morning on the road to the 100 metres freestyle final. If the 4x100 metres relay event over that distance was any indication, that could well be the race of the games. Jenny Thompson of the USA, desperate for an individual success after six relay golds, swam 53.62 in the relays. Dara Torres, the 33-year-old Californian, swam 53.61. De Bruijn swam 53.41 and Therese Alshmar, the Swedish challenger, swam 53.78.
De Bruijn's best weapon in the water is her strength and her size. She has a swimmer's body, long and recently tautened. Outside the water, her personality protects her. She is popular and generally well liked among swimmers. She is also lachrymose in victory and in defeat.
Tears are a horrible weapon to use in the boyish atmosphere of the press room, and no, there is little doubt that the threat of the waterworks has spared her a more exacting interrogation in the press conference area.
One way or another though, Inge de Bruijn is unlikely to get through the rest of this week without a few more tears.
