UNDERDOGS’ DAY

Amy Van Dyken went shopping a few weeks ago and ran into some old high school classmates. The very girls, it happened, who once tried to keep her off the school’s relay swim team by complaining to the coach, throwing her clothes in the pool and spitting in her direction. A severe asthmatic, Van Dyken was a skinny girl with a persistent cough who struggled to make it through a race. But a decade of determination later, “it felt good,” she says, “to walk into the mall and see these girls who wouldn’t swim a relay with me because I swam so bad. I said, ‘Hi, how’re you doing? By the way, I’m swimming in five events in the Olympics. What have you been up to?'”

The bitterness of rejection, and the struggle to overcome a crippling affliction, forged a champion. “She decided to go faster and faster,” her mother recalled last week. So fast that Van Dyken, now a 6-ft. 150-lb. sprinter, rocketed her way to four gold medals, an unprecedented haul for any American woman swimmer in a single Olympics. The 23-year-old Coloradan, daughter of a software-company president, anchored two relay victories, in the 4×100-m freestyle and the 4×100-m medley, and captured two individual golds, in the 100-m butterfly and the 50-m freestyle–a win that crowns her “the world’s fastest woman” in water. She also charmed a worldwide television audience with her exuberant personality. “I’m really stubborn,” she reflected, recalling her treatment in high school. “If someone tells me I stink, I’m going to try to prove them wrong.”

Van Dyken was the most pleasant surprise on the underdog U.S. team, which, spurred on by roars from an unabashedly patriotic hometown crowd, captured 13 gold medals, more than three times as many as their nearest competitors, the Russians. Two of theirs belonged to Alexander Popov, who came in a touch ahead of American Gary Hall Jr. in both the men’s 100-m and 50-m freestyle.

Hungary grabbed three gold medals thanks to backstroker Krisztina Egerszegi, who now has a career total of five individual golds. The reigning Chinese women, who had swept the 1994 World Championships, won but a single race. And a 26-year-old Dubliner, Michelle Smith, emerged from virtual obscurity to capture three golds–in the 400-m and 200-m individual medleys and the 400-m freestyle–plus a bronze in the 200-m butterfly.

But the newly dubbed “Irish Harpoon” left a wake of doubt and innuendo. Until she doused the competition last week, the diminutive Smith–5 ft. 3 in., 128 lbs.–was not ranked among the world’s top-20 swimmers in any of the three races she won. Moreover, her extraordinary surge comes at an age when most swimmers are ready to retire. So while Ireland’s pubs were staying open all night to celebrate their first female gold medalist in Olympic history, the green-eyed blond with the pixie smile was fending off a barrage of questions as to whether her dramatically improved performances were drug enhanced. Smith flatly denied it and credited her wins to new training techniques, a low-fat diet and more rest. But the fact that Smith’s husband and coach, Dutch discus champion Erik de Bruin, is under a four-year ban for doping, fueled speculation, even though Smith was tested at eight competitions this year, and swimming officials have also collected urine samples four times in unannounced visits. “It is very easy to point an accusing finger when you are not doing well,” she says of the charges.

While swimming is considered a cleaner sport than track and field, drugs have been a factor several times in the past few years: East Germany is now known to have doped its female champions for two decades; two years ago, seven Chinese team members were surprise-tested in Japan and found positive for the same drug–dehydrotestosterone–just days after winning 12 out of 16 gold medals at the world championships in Rome. In the past decade, several U.S. swimmers have tested positive, including Angel Martino, who won two individual bronzes and two relay golds last week, after having been kicked off the 1988 Olympic team. “Drug use is epidemic,” says Charles Yesalis, a Penn State professor of health policy and a critic of Olympic drug testing. “There’s always doubt lingering in the background now.”

Experts say tiny amounts of testosterone applied in patches and via skin cream are difficult to detect but can measurably boost strength and speed in women. Moreover, reliable tests have yet to be developed for two popular performance-enhancing substances: human growth hormone and erythropoietin (EPO), which kicks up the oxygen level in the body. Human-growth- hormone doping is well known in the Netherlands, where Smith lives and trains: several cyclists have died from its complications in recent years.

But as the week progressed, attention shifted back to swimming’s newest stars: three American teenagers. “I was so excited, I was, like ‘Wow!'” declared Baltimorean Beth Botsford, 15, after striking gold in the 100-m backstroke. Brooke Bennett, a 16-year-old Floridian, won the 800-m freestyle, leaving a tearful Janet Evans, the queen of long-distance swimming, in sixth place. The youngest U.S. medalist, California’s Amanda Beard, 14–who had her parents bring her teddy bear to the stands–captured two individual silvers in the breaststroke and a relay gold.

Among the men, Jeff Rouse, 26, a Stanford graduate, struck gold in the 100-m backstroke–a medal that had eluded him in Barcelona–and rejoiced that he could no longer be called a choker. Brad Bridgewater, a 23-year-old Texan, won the 200-m backstroke; and Tom Dolan, the Michigan star whose struggle with asthma has made him one of the Games’ heroes, captured a gold in the 400-m individual medley, even as his lungs seized up at the finish. Exhausted, he failed to medal in two other races. “My body just gave out,” he said.

Americans set a world record in the men’s 4×100-m medley relay but none in individual events. That was left to a Russian, Denis Pankratov, who swam the 100-m butterfly in 52.27 sec.; a Belgian, Fred DeBurghgraeve, who churned through the 100-m breaststroke in 1:00.60; and a South African, Penelope Heyns, who broke her own world record in the 100-m breaststroke at 1:07.02 and went on to win a second gold in the 200-m event–the first swimming medals won by South Africa since it was barred from the Games for its policies of apartheid. As Amy Van Dyken says, “An underdog can have a vicious bite.”

–With reporting by David Thigpen/Atlanta