A new dawn

For so long she wore her desperation like a widebrimmed hat. It shadowed her face and it hid her features. The time of humid brooding and heavy tears lasted forever and a day. Then, a few weeks ago, she was on the phone making plans for the Sydney Olympics. It struck her that the time of looking forward had begun again.

The age of grief is so long ago that she can't picture it clearly. The projector in her brain whirrs off and the screen goes white. She never thinks of Atlanta or Athens, other than as old footage from somebody else's movie.

Last Sunday, Sonia O'Sullivan was in Sheffield. Little molehills of significance were inflated without planning permission when she trailed home to Paula Radcliffe. Sonia was gone again. Off the loop and out of the programme. The truth is a less exotic little animal.

"I left my head down here and drove up there and, halfway around the race, I was thinking `what am I doing?' I hadn't got it in my mind that I really wanted to beat her. It didn't mean that much to me."

Not that it didn't rankle. She drove back from Sheffield that evening insisting in taking the wheel herself so she'd have something to concentrate on. She found herself making faces and growling. Tame stuff though.

"I had to work it out. I'd been having this thing with Nick. I wanted him to do something but I wouldn't say. I let it get into this big thing in my head. A whole war in my head. I felt fine running, but my head wasn't there. I've had to sort it out - lay down the ground rules for myself."

Nick is Nick Bideau and he's sitting out on the steps this afternoon taking the London sun. His life and Sonia's intersect in a curious way. Bideau had a long relationship with Australian athlete Cathy Freeman, whom he manages and represents. O'Sullivan was coming out of a relationship with her own coach and manager Kim McDonald. Nick Bideau still manages Freeman. Kim McDonald still manages O'Sullivan. If you didn't know athletes it would seem strange.

While Nick takes the sun, Sonia sits out on the wooden balcony which hangs like a life-raft in the close air over a quiet crook in the Thames. She is radiant and sun-loved and looks happier than you have seen her, all suffused with mellowness.

"Yeah, I'm happy. I was harder to be around before. All that mattered was whatever I wanted to do and nothing else. I'm still the same maybe, I get things in my head. Decide what I'm going to do tomorrow when I'm lying in bed at night and everything has to fit in with me. I'm getting up at nine and have to be gone by 9.30. But now it's nineish."

"I realise now that you get wrapped up in your own little world and you think that everybody is out there looking in thinking about you all the time."

If only they knew. Someday now she'll run home, come straight in and take the hoover out for a waltz, or cut the grass in the wee garden. She still absorbs the comfort of strangers but today she has less need of it. The time of looking forward has filled her life.

"People tell me how sorry they are. They make it sadder than it was because it affected them and they talk as if somebody died, as if something is gone. I am trying to forget about it but that brings me down again. People wrote though after the cross country and they were so happy. New life again. That was lovely that it had that effect. I wonder if I started winning all the races again would people take no notice. I'm lucky this year because there is no athletics on television."

These are things that the old Sonia would never have said. Defeats trouble her but the mechanics of them don't obsess her any more.

"I'm not so selfish any more. Things happen to other people too. If you don't run well people say it could be worse. Moses Kiptanui did a tendon in the Goodwill Games and people would say to me that it could be worse. Look what happened. When you are an athlete that shouldn't matter. There shouldn't be anything worse. Now I think, yeah, poor Moses. Not so much the selfish athlete any more."

In the process of spring cleaning her life she has been converted to the church of Nike. Her Reebok contract ended last year.

They were offering something but she felt that a new start was appropriate, all the more so since she new that Reebok were sweeping their house clean. Two weeks later they swept out everybody except their superstars. Happy chance. Nike's deal was based on bonuses and the world cross country brought her back to normal again.

The bad years didn't hit her financially. "What I would have saved for 10 years time maybe. I'll notice then perhaps. It doesn't cost too much to live now though."

When she won the World Cross Country Championship they flew her out to Nike's headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon and there was a big banner up across the campus: "Welcome Sonia O'Sullivan - World Cross Country champion."

It struck her then, but not for the first time, that she was enjoying this windfall of glory more than she had enjoyed anything in her spangled career.

"In March I just let myself go with it. I wouldn't let myself do that in Gothenburg in 1995. It was just a relief more than anything when I won the World Championships. I can tell in the pictures from events how happy I was afterwards. Gothenburg was sort of `I knew I could do it anyway'. That was my attitude. Now I don't know anymore. I know there are chances and if I take them I can win. That's what I have to think about every time. Do I want it? Can I concentrate enough to take it?"

She has changed in smaller ways. More caution. Fewer headlong headstrong rushes. In her livingroom, facing the painting of Cobh harbour, is a sofa. Splendidly upholstered miracle of the new life.

"I think about things more. I had that sofa in my head since way before Christmas. I went into London and saw it there. Then I saw the same one in a shop in Australia and I measured it up and I was going to order it. I came back and was going to order it and said I'd wait until after the World Cross Country. If you win you'll buy yourself a present. So I bought a couch for myself and there it is."

And life is a little less complicated, her head less teeming with ideas and pressures.

It was difficult at the end with Kim McDonald. As difficult at the end as it had been easy at the start. At first it was dream having the whole package, partner, coach, agent, manager.

"But it got to be so that when we went out for dinner we talked about athletics and business. There was never any break from it. I needed a break, needed to get away. When I wanted to go away and didn't want to talk about running there was nowhere to go. It's Kim's life too, though."

"We get along well now and a lot of his ideas about focus and belief are still in my head, but for a year I couldn't talk to him. Now I call him when I want. He calls me."

They started to communicate again in December last year.

"All last year I didn't want to talk to him or be with him but he was there all the time and I couldn't avoid him. In Honolulu he told me to decide what I wanted. "Do you want to have nothing to do with me or do things properly and communicate. It doesn't work otherwise."

"I used to feel that if he was asking me about training he was being nosey. But he was interested and I just couldn't accept the help. In relation to the Olympics it wasn't as big a deal as people thought. People said it was all his fault and there was a big fight and all that.

"It had nothing to do with it. I was in a frame of mind back then where it was easy for me to block out anything emotionally. Kim agreed with that. That's the way we operated. It was simple to do that. The whole thing was building up with disagreements and I was starting to feel bad coming up to the races. I wasn't happy with running. When we started, my career was all fresh and everything was new. That got old after a while though."

The shift in her relationship with McDonald coincided with the installation of Alan Storey as her new coach. Storey was in America this week on holiday but she was on the phone everyday explaining the detail of her training sessions. He faxes details of the next session. Sonia goes and does what she is bid. To the letter.

It's a strange juncture and she marvels at it. For so long, since Villanova in fact, she devised her own sessions basically, running as hard as she could every time she put on spikes.

She used up a lot of what she had. She ran hard in training, hard all the time. "It's a different level of hardness now," she says. Training just makes her tired rather than wearing her out. She used to ache from training. Liked to feel everyday that she knew could ran faster than everyone else.

"The difference Alan has made is in my head as much as anything. I'm not thinking about sessions for every working hour. He knows what my next session will be and he sends it to me. All I have to do is follow the instructions. I ask him sometimes why am I running slower in training than I know I can run. It's still hard to accept not going flat out."

She spoke with a sports psychologist in Australia and gleaned some useful things, but felt the relationship never developed to a stage where she felt as if she were talking to a friend. She's still open to the idea but the right sports psychologist hasn't arrived yet.

Her relationship with Ireland is on an even keel again. She admits freely that in the past her instinct has been to run from the moist claustrophobia which visits home have induced. "I never knew what people expected of me, so I always just ran away from it."

Then, a while back, in Limerick she found herself being led by the hand by a complete stranger through a shopping centre. He led her upstairs to the hair salon where his wife's hair was getting reshaped. "Look who I met downstairs."

Two years ago such an ordeal would have mortified her.

One little story from two weeks ago shades in the colour of her relationship with Ireland. She flew home for the private sideshow that is the BLE National Championships. Her dad wanted to come up and collect her at the airport but she told him to get sense. She'd get a taxi. So she hit Dublin airport and holiday-makers were swarming like ants. The queue for taxis stretched to Tenerife and back.

But she was ushered into a car straight away. `Here you go Sonia'. And the taxi driver got autographs and pictures and wouldn't take a fare. And Sonia bounded into Santry Stadium with the world springy beneath her feet. And at the desk the BLE woman said.

"£9 please."

"Huh?"

"Your entered for three events - £3 each please."

"But I'm only running one?"

"Still £9."

"Hmmm."

And Sonia is laughing at the good of it. Three years ago it would have rankled. Now it's just a part of life's interesting pattern.

The cross country wins went a long way to erasing the wrinkles from her brow.

Immediately after the 1,500 metres race in Athens last summer, red-eyed and wrecked, she was talking to Alan Storey on the mobile phone and he was telling her that she needed to look forward again.

Specifically to look to the World Cross Country. She took that thought away from Athens with her ragbag of grief. That was where it started.

"For ages I thought I was going to run the short race in Marakesh. I was in Falls Creek and Alan Storey called and mentioned casually that the long race in Marakesh was the real race and the short race was the Mickey Mouse one. That sort of piqued me. I'd been running around planning for the short race. So I went off with that idea. At the track it was going well and I realised there was never a time that the race would be faster than this. So I went for it."

This season has been erratic since then. She accepts with reluctance that the distance work she is doing under Storey's tutelage deprives her of credibility in the 1,500 metres. But a satisfactory 3,000 metres in Nice a few weeks ago reassured her that her overall plan is in order. Looking ahead it is surprising to see the Olympics already a dot on the horizon.

"Definitely the Olympics are still the thing. It took all through last year to get rid of that feeling. I kept thinking I had to make up for it and do something different, something extraordinary. It took me a long time to realise that it was gone. And so many questions about it. I got very defensive about it. I have to be ready, but not obsessed. There were points before when I did get obsessed and I always denied that I did.

"Last year was new for me. Before 1996 it was one year on top of another and last year was another kind of brick in the wall, a different colour brick. So this year is starting over again. Everything can't be perfect for me. I go places and it feels like I have never been there before.

So, on to Budapest. Not life or death, she says. She decided this week that she would run the 10,000 metres there. She likes the deal. No heats. "Just half an hour out of my life."

Her plan is settled. No risks. No daredevil stuff. Track people do what she did in the cross country. And concentrate for the whole race. Symptoms of the new reality.

"People on the track don't respect me as much, they don't take me as seriously, I've lost that edge of people being afraid of me. They don't think I'm serious when I go out there in the front. They don't think they are going to lose a race, they don't think you are capable of running too fast. It seems, from my point of view, that they all believe in themselves more now."

The only one who controls things now in the manner that Sonia used to is Masterkova. She goes to the front and pushes people back with her arms and elbows, her forcefield. Sonia thinks it's not impossible that she would do that again but it takes time and better timing in races.

"Some races now I know I don't have a chance but I have to do as fast a run as I can do. That's not the way it used to be."

She knows that in Budapest they're not going to run any faster than she's able to run. There is a point in a race where it gets hard.

"If it was easy it wouldn't be a race," she says. "You get an eye blink in which to decide if you are going to win or not.

"Last Sunday in Sheffield it lasted three or four seconds. The race came down to three or four seconds. And I missed it. I wasn't alert. I didn't know what I was doing. But there are second chances. There's always second chances. You're just better off making sure you don't have to use them."

Deep into the land of the second chance she gets up every morning and runs down the road and crosses the little bridge which takes her to the other side of the Thames. She knows the world better now. And it doesn't revolve around Sonia O'Sullivan.

"Are you Catherina McKiernan? They ask me that! Then I was running in Teddington after the marathon and this fella shouts after me `arra you'll never be as good as Catherina McKiernan'. All I could think to shout back was `I am'."

Back in Atlanta, in the time of grief and tears, Sonia O'Sullivan's Olympics was a tragic operetta tagged onto one swimmer's big production. This week their paths crossed again each going opposite directions.

"I'm not the same," says Sonia, her world crisp and new beneath her feet. "Every year is a different phase. A new movie every year. This year's movie is Cinderella. Still hanging on and waiting."