Olympic champion De Bruijn retires
AMSTERDAM: Four-times Olympic champion Inge de Bruijn of the Netherlands announced her retirement from swimming on Monday.
De Bruijn, who has not competed at a major international meet since winning the 50 metres freestyle gold medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics, said she had nothing left to achieve.
"My career is finished and I reached the top," de Bruijn said in an interview with Dutch news agency ANP.
"I am 33 years now and a granny in swimming, while my body isn't recovering so well like it did in the past."
De Bruijn was the fittest and most feared female swimmer of her generation. A serial record breaker, she won a stack of world, Olympic and European titles to become one of the greatest athletes of all time.
The only swimmer, male or female, to win more individual Olympic titles than De Bruijn was Hungarian backstroker Krisztina Egerszegi, who won five from 1988 to 1996.
De Bruijn won gold in the 50 and 100 meters freestyle and 100m butterfly at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and defended her 50m freestyle title in Athens four years later.
De Bruijn has given up the chance of competing at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and trying to match Egerszegi and Australian Dawn Fraser as the only swimmers to win the same event at three different Games.
"I will miss the excitement of hearing the Dutch national anthem on the podium, but achieving that is not something that comes easy," De Bruijn said.
"I didn't win any easy gold medals and I am not going to the coming Olympics to finish seventh. I always want to win and that is something I did enough."
De Bruijn made her international debut at the 1991 world championships, winning a bronze medal in a relay, but did not claim her first major long-course title for another eight years.
She considered quitting the sport after she was dropped from the Dutch team for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, but changed coaches and redeveloped her stroke, abandoning the smooth, bent-arm action for the straight-arm "windmill" style popularised by Australian Michael Klim.
To cope with the added physical demands of the windmill action, de Bruijn also committed herself to a gruelling training regime.
Her new muscular physique and the sudden improvement in her performances aroused suspicion from her rivals but she defied her critics with her crowning moment at the Sydney Olympics when she won three gold medals and set three world records, two of which still stand.
De Bruijn, who earned the nickname "Invincible Inky", continued her remarkable streak by winning three titles at the 2001 world championships in Japan.
She finished on top of the podium at the 2003 world championships in Barcelona but her younger rivals were starting to catch up and although De Bruijn won the 50m freestyle in Athens, she lost the 100m freestyle title and world record to Jodie Henry and the 100m butterfly title to Petria Thomas.
Agencies
(China Daily 03/14/2007 page24)
