Ireland has been unable to accept a triple Olympic champion who has been dogged by allegations of drug-taking, writes Fintan o’Toole
At the Atlanta Olympics last year two young women dominated the headlines in Ireland: one, Sonia O’Sullivan, was a world champion expected to win two gold medals; the other, Michelle Smith, was an obscure figure expected to win nothing. Both confounded expectations, O’Sullivan having a disastrous Games and Smith emerging as one of Ireland’s all-time outstanding athletes with three gold medals.
Yet the overturning of expectations in the aftermath of the Games was even more spectacular. O’Sullivan’s travails evoked a wave of sympathy, and the Irish public took her even more closely to their heart. Smith, by contrast, has become an ever more ambivalent figure. The adulation Ireland normally lavishes on its sporting heroes has been held in check by persistent, if unproven, suggestions that her performances at Atlanta were too good to be true.
Recently, for instance, Smith swam in Cork and broke the 15-year-old European short- course record for the 200m butterfly. The capture of a major international record was an unprecedented moment in the history of Irish swimming, and a very rare one in Irish sport. Yet her achievement attracted rather muted media coverage and limited public attention. A nation which once embarrassed Jack Charlton by its worship of an international football team which had not actually won anything has given the most successful athlete in its history at best grudging respect.
The 27-year-old ought to have been perfectly placed to become an Irish icon. She is attractive, articulate and highly intelligent. As controversy gathered about her in Atlanta, she showed grace under pressure, emerging as a cool, clear-headed and quietly confident woman. Her very ordinariness had a mythic appeal, since the addition of water seemed to transform her from a girl-next-door into a ferocious force of nature, utterly indifferent to her opponents, her critics, and the doubts and hesitations of everyday life.
Smith’s intensely close relationship with her Dutch husband and coach, Erik de Bruin, created an additional element of romance that ought to have enhanced her appeal beyond the ranks of sports fans. Her sudden emergence from obscurity, at an age when most swimmers are considered past their best, seemed ready-scripted for the biopic, starring Nicole Kidman as Smith and Tom Cruise as her husband, that was being mooted in the aftermath of Atlanta.
For the Irish, she had the potential to become an image of success in the modern age. On the one hand she is a fluent Gaelic speaker who has promoted the language in television advertisements. On the other, this traditional image is balanced by her willingness to uproot herself and resettle in Holland in pursuit of her sporting goals. As a living parable of Ireland’s ability to become European without losing its identity, she could hardly be bettered.
And besides, ever since Johnny Weissmuller became the celluloid Tarzan, champion swimmers have been potential modern icons: Eleanor Holm, who won the backstroke in the 1932 Olympics, was depicted as a mermaid in a series of murals by Salvador Dali; the American swimming champion Esther Williams starred in a series of Hollywood swimming spectaculars.
Smith seemed to be about to take a similar plunge into the realms of modern myth. Instead, she has become a victim rather than an icon of Ireland’s modernity. Even a decade ago the Irish were for the most part a trusting people in what was still a relatively conservative culture. Heroes – political, religious and sporting – were given an easy ride, and if they were criticised by foreigners, the wagons of wounded national pride would be drawn in a circle to defend their reputations.
When Smith’s achievements at Atlanta were initially questioned by the American swimmer Janet Evans, the criticism triggered the traditional Irish reaction. Because Evans had just been soundly beaten by Smith, her unsubtle hints that her rival’s progress was inexplicable without recourse to performance-enhancing drugs left a bitter taste. And Evans’s attacks merely seemed to confirm Smith’s heroic status in the eyes of the Irish public.
The case against her, after all, was essentially one of guilt by association with her husband, whose record on drugs in sport is rather murky. Moreover, she had a strong case for the defence. She has never failed a drug test. Her times at Atlanta were good but not especially remarkable. She did not quite emerge from nowhere: she had won two gold medals at the last European championships. She has been guilty of nothing more than being secretive about her training methods. By normal standards of fairness, Smith had a right to demand, at the very least, the benefit of the doubt.
But adulation does not operate according to judicial standards of guilt and innocence. It is an all-or-nothing affair: hero- worship asks no questions, entertains no doubts. Smith’s misfortune was to become a public figure at a time when the public was full of doubts and eager to ask a million questions. She was a heroine trying to emerge at a distinctly unheroic period in Irish history.
The past few years in Ireland have been marked by a collapse of authority and an end of innocence. Trust was breaking down. Well-loved bishops and priests were being exposed as hypocrites, respected politicians were turning out to be dodgy characters. The failures of long- established institutions were being revealed, and the mood was becoming sceptical, even cynical. Public figures were assumed guilty unless proved innocent, and sport could not escape the spread of scepticism. The Michelle Smith story of epic achievement was to come in for critical scrutiny.
In that context, it is not so surprising that Smith has been unable to barter her achievements into the kind of iconic status that might have made her wealthy. She has been able to buy a nice house in Kilkenny and has been getting a fair amount of work from Irish television. But the pot of gold has proved elusive.
Advertisers want unqualified appeal, and Smith has become too divisive a figure to supply it. Without intending it to happen, she has become an emblem of national divisions: to some she is a secular martyr, done down by the same relentless media cynics who have undermined the authority of church and state; to others, hers is a test case for unflinching honesty about the truth behind seductive images of success. Either way, it is all much too fraught and complicated for the marketing men.
— Fintan O’Toole is a columnist with the Irish Times