With some of the biggest stars in the world on view, the name of Allison Wagner among the entries for the 100m freestyle and 100m butterfly went mostly unnoticed.

She wasn't expect to figure in the shake-up and she didn't, finishing 32nd in one event and 39th in the other. Yet, more than all the other competitors honing their strokes towards Beijing, Wagner's presence was an achievement worth noting.

For most of you, the name won't ring a bell. But you watched her race once. It was very late on a Saturday night in the summer of 1996. Is the picture becoming clearer? Wagner was leading the 400m Individual Medley at the Atlanta Games when Michelle Smith de Bruin steamed past her in the final quarter of the race to take the gold. Remember now? You were, like the rest of the nation, most likely out of your seat by the time Smith touched home three seconds ahead of the 18-year-old American.

"You have to fool the body, " said Smith de Bruin after the race. "Because it adapts so quickly, it won't react as much if you keep doing the same things. I am still a little bit in shock. I can't do much better than this."

Unlike her mouthy compatriot Janet Evans, Wagner didn't voice much of a public opinion about the 26-year-old Dubliner's remarkable rate of improvement and so she never entered the pantheon of begrudgers trying to knock the "Golden Girl". Instead, she took her punishment, retreated from the spotlight and went back to college at the University of Florida. The defeat by a woman ranked 41st in the world going into the race had taken a serious toll however. For the first time in her career, Wagner had to face up to failing to complete her set goal of winning gold.

A psychological price would have to be paid.

Losing a race she'd been training for seven hours a day for a decade is one thing. Losing it to somebody about whom there are serious rumours and scurrilous whispers of performance-enhancing drugs is something else altogether. Especially when she did the hard part, holding off Hungary's Kristzina Egerszegi, the reigning champion, the swimmer to beat in the 400m IM. Worse again, this was the second time Wagner had been deprived of gold at a major championships by a suspect opponent.

At the 1994 Worlds, she'd finished second behind China's Dai Guohong, another who rose without trace to take gold and was barely ever seen again. There is a tendency when viewing the doping crisis to obsess about those bending the rules and thieving sport of its integrity Too often, we forget there are others more directly affected by the cheating, more damaged by the fall-out. Their stories are the footnotes to some of the most depressing decades in sporting history.

For Wagner, Smith de Bruin proved a defeat too far. Motivated by the perverse notion that if she could only get thinner she might be able to beat the cheats, she developed a serious eating disorder and had to drop out of college for a time to go to rehab. Effectively, her career as a competitive swimmer . . . the defining aspect of her life . . . had already begun to end the moment the Irish woman swept past her in Atlanta.

The road from the Renfrew Treatment Centre in Coconut Creek, Florida to Santa Clara last weekend took Wagner all over the world. With previous occupations including bartender and mail room clerk, she travelled the globe on her own back in 2001 and became an enthusiastic painter. It was a job teaching swimming to developmentally-disabled kids that eventually brought her back to the pool and over time persuaded her the place that broke her heart could still bring much pleasure.

Six years after last seriously working out, she began training last summer with a group of elite competitors including America's current darling Natalie Coughlin. Ironically at Santa Clara, Wagner broke 57 seconds for the freestyle for the first time in her life, more than half a second faster than Smith's best at that distance.

"What I really admire about Allison is her willingness to compete just for herself, " said her present coach Teri McKeever. "Swimming gave her great joy and then it gave her great pain, and instead of being bitter, she's come back and is swimming on her own terms."

McKeever was quoted in a large New York Times feature last Sunday which afforded America a rare glimpse of how cheating ruins lives. Of course, it's not just Americans who might take notice. Apologists for Smith have argued that she never tested positive, that the test where she was found guilty of tampering with a urine sample came long after the Atlanta Olympics, and anyway the whiskey was poured into the sample by mischievous mad scientists in some laboratory in Spain. They would all do better to realise there were other women in that pool who lost much more than their reputations.

"My main goal was to discover true happiness while competing, " said Wagner of her return to action. "I hadn't felt that feeling since I was eight-years-old. The great thing is I'm 30 next month, and I can be whatever I want. We all can."

More power to her.