The 1996 Olympics and her three gold medals are part of her high-profile career that Michelle Smith de Bruin remembers with a great sense of pride. Photograph: Frank Miller
To many in Irish swimming it was a significant moment. The time of 4:39.18 had been out of reach for Irish women since Smith de Bruin became one of the most talked-about athletes of the Atlanta Olympics. Not until Katie Taylor arrived in London 2012 to win gold had any Irish athlete attracted close to as much global media attention.
In a home/style/celebrity Q&A piece printed in 2013, she was asked to choose a picture that spoke a thousand words. She picked the one of her standing beside then-US president Bill Clinton, who amid fevered commotion arrived at the swimming event with his daughter Chelsea and wrapped his arms around Smith de Bruin. Feeling her pain, Clinton said to her: “I admire you for all the crap they’ve thrown at you.
For comparison, in the Irish men’s record list for individual swims there is no record older than six years – Shane Ryan’s 100m freestyle and 50m backstroke marks set in 2018. At world level there are no individual female long-course records older than from 2009. That record belongs to Zige Liu in the 200m butterfly, set while swimming in a body suit.
Over those two or three years around 1996, it was difficult to keep up with the speed and variety of Smith de Bruin’s breathtaking swims as she set new marks and broke new ground. In the year before Atlanta, she set Irish records in the freestyle at 50m, 100m, 400m and 800m, the butterfly at 100m and 200m, the medley events at 200m and 400m and the backstroke at 100m.