Late Late not place to discuss ban, says de Bruin
The Dubliner, who said she still feels like a heroine, said the Pat Kenny show was not the place to deal with her past.
She was the only one of the participants in RTÉ’s Celebrities Go Wild not to appear on the Late Late Show. On NewsTalk 106-108fm yesterday, barrister Ms De Bruin said she felt she was treated differently from the other participants in the RTÉ programme.
Asked by presenter Brenda Power why she wouldn’t answer questions on her Olympic wins, Ms De Bruin replied: “Well, I answered them 10 years ago and I’ve moved on with my life and I’m doing something different. I don’t think that was really the venue to deal with it.”
The swimming ban was imposed in 1998 on Ms De Bruin, two years after her Olympic glory.
She said: “The producer of the Late Late Show rang me and he wanted to go through the controversy about what happened to me 10 years ago.
“On the other hand I had been told by the producers of Celebrities Go Wild that people would be brought on and asked what they knew about the programme, what they expected and what was their attitude towards it.
“I didn’t feel that I should be treated differently, I was told that there wasn’t an option.
“I told them I wasn’t prepared to do that, but I left the decision to them. The producer said he would come back to me, but he never did.
“The producers of Celebrities Go Wild came back to me the next day and said ‘the Late Late Show will take seven people on tonight, but they won’t have you’.”
Meanwhile, the former swimmer says she still feels like a heroine.
“A couple of days ago, I was at the Texaco Sports awards. A woman came up to me and she told me that the week that I was in the Olympics she was heavily pregnant and was due to give birth. She said she couldn’t actually go into labour until I’d finished all of my races and as soon as I was finished she went into labour and had the baby. Of course, she had been telling her son about this story for the last 10 years so she couldn’t go home without getting my autograph. I still get people coming up to me telling me those type of stories, all the time.”
