Tara Kirk's retirement from racing at the age of 26 and in the wake of a depressing end to a world-class career can be looked at from dozens of angles and through the eyes of all parties to a mess that no-one would wish to see repeated.  Many of the issues raised by the case of a swimmer who finishes third in a race behind a rival (Jessica Hardy) who subsequently tests positive for doping - but then finds herself still locked out of an Olympic team she had a right to be a member of, will be poured over as the breaststroke ace takes her case against USA Swimming through a legal minefield.

But here is one angle that is rarely considered but will doubtless be taken on board by those who govern USA Swimming as they seek to make sure that the events that unfolded in the wake of US Olympic trials in Omaha last year are never repeated, time schedules and rosters, official team handbooks, etc, or not: the feelings of the coach who worked long and hard to help nurture Kirk's talent and now looks into the eyes of youngsters seeking explanations and assurances about the nature of what is fair and what is not.

Gabe Mazurkiewicz, is the Polish-born head coach of the Roseburg Swim Team who at Bremerton, WA, served as development guide to Kirk. He also coached Kirk's sister Dana and Nathan Adrian, among others. His first feeling when he heard that Kirk had decided to call it a day in dreadful circumstances was: "horrible, horrible".

The memories of an emotionally draining few weeks back before Beijing flooded back. "I remember crying together with Tara on the deck of the warm-down pool at Omaha after her loss," Mazurkiewicz told SwimNews. "My heart was bleeding. Then I had learned about Jessica ... it is like someone ripped your body open and pulled your guts out while laughing in your face at your misery. That's still how I feel. Tara has recourse to law, to finding explanations and, yes, receive emotional and financial compensation for being treated unfairly. But for me the questions pounding in my head are 'What I will say to her? Shit happens? Life isn't fair? You're not guilty of anything? We love you no matter what? or even Everything happens for a reason? You're still a champ in my eyes? Chin up, Tara? I don't know what to say to her."

And if he should ever find the right thing to say to a swimmer who has put so many years of effort and care - alongside parents, friends, sponsors, coaches, school support and on and on - into pursuing Olympic dreams, he must then turn round and face the next generation and offer an assurance that what Kirk was forced to endure would never happen to them.

"What am I to tell my swimmers?" asks Mazurkiewicz. "What to say to those age-groupers and the high school swimmers who I coach now? Normally, I have a 10-15-minute talk before the practice. The kids enjoying it ... not because I'm smart and funny but because they hope to start the workout later and cut some yardage! I play the idiot, like I don't get what they're up to - but it makes for a fun time! Today I had close to 60 swimmers on the deck gathering for my talk before practice. One of the kids asked me whether it was true that Tara finished her career because of unjust treatment from USA Swimming. I confirmed that Tara had decided to retire - but tried to leave it there. They weren't fooled: c'mon Gabe - what do you think about it?" Emotions ran high. "Breathing heavily, I was silent for a few minutes. I had tears in my eyes. The kids got in the water quietly and started the warm-up."

The coach explained: "The thing is you are being bombarded everyday about the need for fair play, to raise funds for new pools by increasing membership fees, the drive to make your nation proud of you, to work hard, dream big. I wonder what Tara feels of all that now.  I know her - and no matter what she may say publicly, you can bet that the dissolution of her dreams has left her suffering tenfold what her words suggest. We're talking about a role model of a youngster who grew up in the belief that hard work is rewarded with a successful and fulfilling life.

"She did everything right. She's a great person, great student, great athlete - and she's been destroyed by an organisation that has not been big enough to admit that it made a mistake. So, what am I going to tell my swimmers? Maybe USA Swimming has the answer."

As USA Swimming considers the litigation facing it, it will doubtless not only have an eye on the book it needs to balance but on the balance it needs to show when dealing with its key asset: world-class swimmers. There is evidence that it knows that and indeed agrees with it. It must now find a way to put common-sense thought into practice. Hindsight is a great tool when planning for a better future - and it arrived very early in the Kirk case.

Back in Beijing, head coach Mark Schubert said: "The obvious solution is timely testing. To be honest, I don't think we ever contemplated ever getting the drug results later than July 11, than when we asked for them. We were paying for expedited results. That would be a question for [the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency], because they're a third-party vendor of the USOC. We can't dictate to them. We can only request."

Perhaps so, but where is the let-out clause for late delivery of doping test results on the eve of the most important moment in the elite sports career of any swimmer or coach? Where is the mechanism to allow additions to teams to be made under exceptional circumstances? Nothing is impossible if you really want it to happen. So swimmers and coaches are told as they shoot for the stars. The same ought to apply to those who lay down the rules and frameworks within which the sport of swimming operates.

One of the key roles of a federation - if not the key role - is to facilitate, to deliver the best-possible environment in which excellence can thrive. That includes making sure that a USA swim team - the No1 team in the world - has two swimmers in every solo event at the Olympic Games after trials that on time alone would have allowed every finalist access to the Games were it not for the number restriction imposed on national entries. 

After her arbitration hearing last summer, Kirk wrote a blog stating: "Yesterday I participated in arbitration on this whole crazy situation. It was long and tough and not very enjoyable but it was something that had to be done. At the end of it all, the Arbitrator found that the system was flawed and that that flawed system was applied to me and I suffered from it. He felt that he did not have the power to name me to the Olympic team because USA Swimming did not go outside of its rules to avoid naming me to the team, but that I still may have cause to ask for damages and a rule change. Since there isn’t a lot of urgency to these two things, the Arbitrator has set the matter over for at least a month, and I am going to think about picking them up at a later point to avoid being a distraction to the team.

"It’s disappointing but not devastating. I haven’t had a great track record of things going my way lately, but I still feel that we made progress. Not as much as I would like and not as much as I feel that I deserve, but progress nonetheless. I wouldn’t say that the decision suggests that USA Swimming was right in what it did. It simply means that we can’t turn back time on what happened and make me an 2008 Olympian as I should be."

A letter from USA Swimming's executive director Chuck Wielgus to his staff on the arbitration case indicates that USA Swimming understood straight away the need to find the right mechanism to ensure that no-one need ever again suffer the injustice that Tara Kirk endured. Responsibility rests not only with USA Swimming but the whole string of bureaucracy that needs to tweak the machine in the interests of protecting clean athletes and the principle of fair play.

"I think we need to name alternates in every event, and I think those alternates need a commitment to train," wrote Wielgus. "Then we need to work out, with the organising committee and with FINA, if there's a positive test, how a replacement could happen and if we could have some type of an exception to the entry deadline. If something like this were to happen in the future. It wouldn't be unlike what we asked [breaststroker] Scott Usher to do. Because we weren't sure what the diagnosis was going to be for Eric [Shanteau], whether he was going to be cleared to compete. At the end of the trials we asked him to make a commitment to train, which he did right up until the 21st. We got daily reports from his coach and from him. Ideally, I can't speak for the committee but that would be my recommendation in the future as to how we'd handle this situation."

The right train of thought has been in place for a while, it seems. With trials for Rome around the corner, time for the locomotive to leave the station, to set right the wrong, to ensure that the game of legal hide-and-seek beats a path to the only conclusion that would be fair: to provide closure to a swimmer who deserved better treatment. Only then will Mazurkiewicz and many other coaches in programmes across the US be able to look their swimmers in the eye and tell them: be assured that injustice will not be tolerated by those who govern your sporting world.