Back to the future once again

THIS was supposed to be her lime. The main press centre in Atlanta is situated downtown in a grey box of a building. The Inforum. Ugly building. Ugly, functional name. Sonia O'Sullivan is the only Irish athlete to have seen the inside of The Inforum. She had an hour there on Monday. Really, Monday should have been better.

A not so funny thing happened on the way to The Inforum. For the first time in her life, Sonia O'Sullivan quit a race. She thinks maybe she pulled out once when she was at Villanova University. If so, it was because she was told to.

So Monday she told the media about why it wasn't such a great day. The previous night she had taken her usual, post race sleeping tablet. Sleeping tablets do little on such nights. There were tears. She woke twice in the middle of the night drenched in sweat. Woke twice to the water down the back reality of a shrinking dream.

This was supposed to be her time. First Irish woman to win track gold. First winner of the 5,000 metres. First Irish track gold in 40 years. First part of a golden double. All hers for the claiming.

She spoke of Sunday night. Her night. She'd never seen a race run with such a slow last lap. It was a race which cried out for her long strides to devour the last bend. A race filled with shuttling tactics and the bump and grind of desperate runners. Just what she loves. She was packing her bags as it spooled itself out.

She told her story and then sat and watched the bickering which followed in the bowels of The Inforum. The accusations, the exaggerations, the piddling little pieces of politics. People opening their mouths scarcely knowing what was going to spill out. Monday shouldn't have been like this.

"I'm a bit cold now," she said to her mother afterwards, wrapping her arms around herself. Sonia's face was blank and pale. Her family wrapped itself around her for warmth. Father, mother and brother, shielding her from all those who had come for a gander.

John and Mary O'Sullivan have grown used to these occasions, the problems of getting near their daughter when all the world wants a piece of her, the difficulties of being left to answer the questions when Sonia vanishes into her cocoons of intensity, her van guards of triumph or vaults of despair. On Sunday, they'd dutifully shown up at a party in the Irish Olympic house in Deacatur, then made their way home on the train. Alone.

"We didn't have so many friends then," said John O'Sullivan, grinning.

Sonia didn't get a lift home either. Having skipped out of the stadium with tears on her cheeks, she'd jogged home in the company of her agent and partner, Kim McDonald. The tight O'Sullivan team had billeted themselves in a house on the fringe of the city centre. A house where privacy would be guaranteed and where journalists wouldn't haunt the lobby.

McDonald is a former athlete, a useful distance runner whose track days were shortened by injury. He'd known nothing of Sonia's illness, yet he wasn't surprised to hear of it as the wash of the 5,000 final broke.

"I'm like that. A lot of athletes are As an athlete, I know Sonia as well as anybody. She withdraws into herself before a race. If there is a problem, it seems as if it won't get any bigger if you don't tell anyone. You don't want fuss before a race. She didn't want fuss. She kept it in and hoped it would go away.

In all this, the past serves as a prologue. Stuttgart in 1993. She watched three Chinese rumours materialise as athletes and finish in front of her in the 3,000 metres final. Storm clouds of hysteria broke around her.

"Nobody has died," she whispered to team psychologist Lucy Moore in the aftermath. Then she turned her face to the 1,500 metres race to follow. In defeat, as in preparation, she requires insularity.

Her father, John, uttered the same words last Sunday night. "Nobody has died." By then his daughter was beginning the six mile jog back to her rented house, trying to divine the origins of her sudden weakness. Pat Hickey, president of the OCI, was driving her bag of gear home in his car. RTE was closing its transmission to a stunned nation, unable to offer up any answers.

"We talked it over," said Kim McDonald. "She looked forward straight away. There are things about Sonia. She's a people's athlete. There were so many questions left behind when she went. People were very concerned. People worry about Sonia. People rang the office, pressmen even, and they were just asking after her. That meant a lot. People just wanted to know if she was okay.

"That sort of thing made her strong for the 1,500. She is beginning to understand that she is an athlete who people come to see. All those Irish flags in the stadium. That's not usual in athletics. People come to watch the racing, but Sonia is one of those athletes they keep an eye out for and cheer for.

"So that lifted her, and then we talked about what Sonia owes herself. All the goodwill is there, but she owed herself. Sonia is the one who has run all the miles on her own. This is hers. She has worked all the days and come through all the injuries. She has developed her career as an athlete to this point. There are so many reasons inside her for looking forward instead of looking back."

Besides, the rest of her life would be for looking back. Monday there was still some looking forward to do. She ran lightly and tentatively in the morning for 25 minutes, shaking the kinks out of her system and clearing her head. Two days to the 1,500 metre heats. No ill effects.

After the sad, sad spectacle of the press conference, she was driven home again by Pat Hickey. Trained again. Held her breath and hoped the world would be the way it used to be when she exhaled.

"I'll just have to put on the blinkers. Regardless of what comes up. I'm going to have to deal with it.

ABOVE all the quiet drama and silent tears, the rat-a-tat gunfire of petty politics could be heard all this week. The big star from the small place was betrayed right through these past seven days.

We pressed around her intrusively on Sunday night and on Wednesday morning when her grief cried out for privacy and the embrace of family. We shoved the whirring recorders and nosey cameras in her face and demanded answers which she couldn't even supply for herself.

Sonia O'Sullivan endured worse than that, however. The corrosive rust of betrayal ate away at this Olympic effort, polluted the purity of track.

Perhaps one Olympic official, Mr Warren T Ring, did indeed take it upon himself to challenge Sonia O'Sullivan and make her strip off and change into the correct brand of running gear eight days ago. The rights and wrongs of the squalid running gear argument hardly matter anymore.

The slimy residual of this low tide argument is the knowledge that the athlete came second on the list of priorities. Somebody was prepared to stop her running on Friday night. Somebody else was happy to make her sit through an unseemly press conference on the matter on Monday afternoon.

It didn't end there, In the battle between Bord Luthcleas na hEireann (BLE) and the Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI), being able to weld your shoulder to that of the big star meant a lot.

For instance," said Christy Wall, international secretary of BLE on Thursday afternoon, at another press conference, "we don't know why Sonia O'Sullivan was driven to the stadium in the car of the president (Pat Hickey) when all our other athletes had to take the bus."

That Sonia O'Sullivan was staying in a private house that wasn't served by the Olympic shuttle buses might have had something to do with it. So, too, might the fact that Sonia O'Sullivan was being used as a weapon in a war.

Again the past serves as a prologue. Three years ago, in Stuttgart, BLE was so poor that as athletes were eliminated from their competitions they were placed on planes back to London or Ireland. BLE couldn't afford to keep them in Germany. In Stuttgart, BLE had a decathlete, Barry Walsh, who had to compete without owning a vaulting pole. Walsh borrowed a pole from a German competitor.

Irish track and field is small time. With out the £75,000 of gear a year which Asics supplies, the pressure to survive would be unmanageable. Since Stuttgart, a major star has emerged. Irish athletics needs a big stars desperately as a fish needs water.

Unfortunately, the OCI swim in the same pond. To stand on the steps of the air plane with one arm around Michelle Smith and another around Sonia O'Sullivan, with five gold medals to be carried through the airport metal detector, is the dream of any OCI executive.

The marketing of success as an Olympic commodity, rather than the product of any individual sport, is a necessity for the OCI. Athletics officials have been feeling neutered for some time now. Grant disbursements no longer pass through their hands, but are funnelled through the OCI. This past week, frustration turned to outright bitterness.

All week BLE officials have been pushing the line both in public and in private that the absence of their official medical personnel has had a debilitating effect on the team effort. There may be a grain of truth in that assertion, but not the weight of significance which was attributed as things went wrong with O'Sullivan's unfolding illness and Marie McMahon's failed drug test.

For a start, it is hardly as if the athletes were unfamiliar with the Olympic Council's medical personnel Dr Joe Cummiskey, Dr Conor O'Brien and physio Ger Hartmann. In addition, all other sports federations represented in Atlanta expressed no complaints about the medical services made available to them in the Irish Olympic house.

Yet, in the climate of political expediency, blame had to be pegged somewhere. The accrediting of Kim McDonald and Reebok representative Guy McCallum to the Irish official party was as convenient a peg as any.

If the agent and the Reebok man hadn't been accredited, the line went, well then the BLE medics would have been and, therefore, none of this would have happened. Sonia would have been checked out in plenty of time. Marie McMahon wouldn't have gulped down the handiest decongestant. Maybe it wouldn't have rained on Wednesday afternoon.

Worse. Having seen Pat Hickey play the big star card relentlessly, first with Michelle Smith and then with Sonia O'Sullivan, athletics officials felt slighted and threatened. Some slipped journalists the line that O'Sullivan's stardom was unbalancing other Irish athletes by some process of osmosis.

"They resent her not wanting to wear the same vest as the rest of the team," said one BLF officer. If the village people were so easily distracted from the Olympian purpose that they were wounded by the erosion of the campfire spirit, it would speak volumes, of course, for the decision of an elite athlete to stay away in order to focus.

That wasn't the point, however. The point for BLE was to blame the team's misfortunes on O'Sullivan and, by extension, those who had lined up with her. The point for the OCI was to blame O'Sullivan's (and others) misfortunes on BLE. Both sides lost the argument.

The point for the rest of us was the athletes. In the end, the finger jabbing and sabre rattling were just a flimsy pretext for stripping a bad week of what poignant dignity it might have had.

They could have stayed silent.

Sonia O'Sullivan would still have got sick. Marie McMahon would still have inadvertently swallowed Robitussen. Running gear companies would have sorted their differences. It still would have rained on Wednesday afternoon.

Official silence would have been the nearest thing to golden.