The torment of Sonia O'Sullivan endures after another deeply distressing night for the woman for whom painful self analysis has now, sadly, become almost a way of life.

O'Sullivan left her world 5,000 metres title on the track and her immediate future hanging precariously in the balance after missing the cut for tomorrow's final by some four seconds.

Now the time has finally come, I suspect, for one of the country's favourite athletes to make the decision from which she has shrunk for almost a year.

By taking a long break from competition after this difficult experience, the hope is that she will gain a realistic chance of re-establishing herself as the most consistent middle distance runner in the world.

With the benefit of hindsight, it was easy to point the finger after the deposed champion, a mere shell of the athlete who was invincible for so long, had finished in seventh place in the semi-final in a time of 15 minutes 40.82 seconds, almost a full minute outside her career best figures.

Now with the pain of it all etched into her face and a thousand thoughts, perhaps, crowding her mind, she could offer no plausible explanation, no new theories for the collapse which has turned a vivacious athlete into a highly vulnerable one.

"Some people advised me against coming here, others took a different view, but ultimately I had to be guided by my own feelings," she said. "I had done the work, prepared well, but it still fell apart for me. I accept now that there is something wrong but I don't know what it is. "My plan was to take the lead five laps out and then throw in two fast laps. But when the race quickened, it felt as if I was stuck to the track. I thought about stopping but then decided I couldn't do that - I had to see it through to the end.

"At the finish, I still had enough strength to race the last 120 metres, hoping against hope that somehow I'd get in as one of the fastest losers. But, deep down, I knew the worst.

"Coming here, I had a lot of hope and a lot of hard work in the bank. I did it because I love the sport. but it didn't work. Now . . ."

After her many triumphant journeys across the world and the joyous press conferences which followed them in different stadiums, the postscripts to Sonia O'Sullivan's races have now become poignant to the point where they are being truncated to avoid imposing unduly on her sensitivities.

That is a scenario which was unthinkable before the disasters of Atlanta, a little more than a year ago. And it has now reached a stage where it has crossed the divide between disappointment and disillusionment.

With the ready consent of all present, it was agreed that the post mortem into this latest collapse be restricted to just a couple of questions. After that, the woman who has given Irish people so many memorable moments over the years was alone with her dilemma and the recurring question of whether she should now break temporarily with the sport which has been her life since childhood.

The story of the race, the second of the 5,000 metres semi-finals, is easily told. After Gabriela Szabo had won the first race from Paula Radcliffe and Harumi Hiroyama in the mundane figures of 15 minutes 26.62 seconds, it was felt that the three fastest losers would come from the other semi-final.

As it transpired, however, that race proved even slower, and if the champion was going to qualify she would have had to claim one of the six automatic places. But O'Sullivan, looking hot and unmistakably tense before the race, couldn't meet that target and when the Kenyan, Lydia Cheronei threw in two sub-72-second laps, the holder was irretrievably adrift.

O'Sullivan, who at one point in the race was running in 13th place, attempted to retrieve a hopeless situation over the last three laps. But while she eventually pulled back to seventh place on the line, she never had a realistic chance of catching the sixth qualifier in the race, Yuko Kawakami of Japan.

Una English, Ireland's other representative in the race, was at one point at O'Sulivan's shoulder, but with two laps to go ran out of strength and finished 13th in 16 minutes 07.09 seconds.

In the first semi-final, Valerie Vaughan ran respectably but without any real chance of qualifying when recording a time of 15 minutes 57.58 seconds to finish 14th.