Laure Manaudou Retains Dignity Despite Naked Photos and Sextape

I don't really feel like the defending champion," confessed Laure Manaudou on her arrival in Beijing. "Four years is a long time." In the case of the French swimmer who took the 400m freestyle gold in Athens, the past 12 months alone must have felt like an age. A little less than four years ago, she was the 17-year-old whom France christened La Sirène (the mermaid), and whose tally of gold, silver and bronze caused Le Monde to declare: "A star is born". Today, an internet search of her name throws up hits like "Laure Manaudou naked pictures" and "Laure Manaudou sex video 100% authentic" before it gets around to directing surfers to information about her swimming career.

The 100% authentic sex video in fact features two baboons on a rock - though the sex would appear to be authentic - but you will have gathered by now that it has not been the most relaxing build-up to these Games for Manaudou. Last night, she expressed reserved pleasure that she made it through to the finals of the 400m free and the tonight's 100m backstroke semis, but until then the aspect of her Beijing experience that she had enthused about was that "it's great to be invisible".As the first French swimmer to win gold since 1952, she returned home from Athens a national heroine. Naturally, she was presented with the Légion d'Honneur, although we might class that as not quite the honneur it once was, what with the likes of Barbra Streisand having picked up one recently, believed to be for services to biannual farewell tours. More telling were the advertisers falling over themselves to sign Manaudou, and L'Equipe classing her as the only athlete in France as popular as the nation's footballers. Everything was going - yes - swimmingly.

Then, two years ago, she fell in love, with Italian swimmer Luca Marin. You might have observed Marin coming fifth to Michael Phelps in the 400m individual medley yesterday. Frankly, it was hard not to observe him: he was the only competitor in a luminous orange suit. It is traditionally mermaids that lure men into dangerous waters, but in 2007 the mermaid herself announced that she was leaving her longtime French coach, and eloping to Italy to be with her boyfriend and train at a Turin club."Between Italy and France," she declared, "I have chosen Luca Marin, the love of my life. I want to live with him and have a baby."Within months, alas, this sweetly-voiced dream had taken a turn for the worse. The Turin club expelled her for what they deemed a lazy attitude, and by the time the European short-course championships came around in Hungary last December, the golden couple appeared to be rapidly oxidising. In fact, their continuous, open sniping marked them out as the poolside Sybil and Basil Fawlty.

Matters came to a head when Manaudou threw the ring Marin had given her into the pool, and formally broke off their relationship when he followed her into the changing room. Within hours - and you are begged not to put two and two together and make five - nude photos and a private video of Manaudou had appeared on the internet. Marin declared himself completely baffled as to how they had got there. He had looked at them "like everyone else", he said gallantly, but it was "ridiculous to think it was me who put them there". The real culprit? Alas, Interpol's unwillingness to take up the case means it remains one of those classic unsolvable mysteries, like the murder of OJ Simpson's ex-wife and her boyfriend.The soap opera took yet another turn when Federica Pellegrini - who had broken Manaudou's world record in the semi-finals of a meet in Melbourne that year - began a relationship with Marin. Yesterday Pellegrini set a new Olympic record in the 400m free, so she and Manaudou will meet in the final. "The woman to beat, the woman to follow is Federica," says a gracious Manaudou.

She still declares herself "violated" by the revelations of the past year, and it is impossible not to sympathise, even for those baffled by the younger generations who regard sex as somehow incomplete unless it is has been committed to a memory stick. Looked at optimistically, if you are going to be caught up in a nude photo scandal, France is probably the country from which to hail. In America, the discovery that a 19-year-old, multimillionaire High School Musical star may not actually be a virgin is likely to send the country into paroxysms of shock, but the French are rather more sanguine, declining to view such moments as the lapsarian catastrophe that is, say, Hannah Montana in a sheet on the cover of Vanity Fair.In fact, the French leapt to their prodigal daughter's defence, and Beijing finds her newly philosophical after the experiences of the past year. "Anything I achieve here is a bonus," Manaudou said last week. "If it goes well, great. If it doesn't go well, it's not the end of the world. I'm not going to die as a result."