Michelle de Bruin, who won three gold medals in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, lost an appeal yesterday to lift a four-year ban for tampering with a urine sample in a suspected effort to mask the presence of banned drugs. The ban will keep her out of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia, as well as the world championships in 2001.
De Bruin used her maiden name, Michelle Smith, at the Summer Games in Atlanta. A relatively obscure Irish swimmer, she won three golds there and several competitors questioned her sudden emergence.
In January 1998, at her home in Kilkenny, Ireland, she submitted to a random drug test. But the urine sample was so contaminated with alcohol that it was impossible to determine whether her sample contained banned substances.
De Bruin was suspended last August after the international swimming federation ruled that she had manipulated that urine sample. She contended that the samples were not hers and that someone had purposely switched samples.
At a hearing last month, she told an appeals panel, ''I don't have to prove my innocence here.'' But a three-member Court of Arbitration for Sport panel ruled in Lausanne, Switzerland, yesterday that the 28-year-old de Bruin did have the burden of proof.
The court said it believed that she ''was the only person who had the motive and opportunity to manipulate the sample.''
FINA, the swimming federation that brought the charges, said that her sample had been laced with so much alcohol -- presumably whisky -- that it would have killed a person if it had been ingested.
The only further avenue of appeal would be in civil court. Her lawyer, Peter Lennon, did not say whether he would pursue that course.
De Bruin is coached by her husband, Erik de Bruin, a discus thrower and shot-putter from the Netherlands, who was banned for four years after testing positive for high testosterone levels.