Cross country back on O'Sullivan's agenda

Sonia O'Sullivan will today contact BLE with a view to being entered for the shorter of the two women's races in the World Cross Country championships at Marrakesh on March 22nd.

It follows her fluent win in the Australian cross country trials at Canberra on Sunday when she finished 30 seconds ahead of Australian Natalie Harvey in a time of 20 minutes 17 seconds for the six-kilometre course.

It was only the third time in her career that she raced beyond 5,000 metres and while she had few problems getting the extra distance, doubts remain if she will be fully competitive over 8,000 metres, the distance at which an Irish team is scheduled to compete at Marrakesh.

"Obviously, I would prefer to run in the shorter of the two races and I will be putting this to BLE tomorrow," O'Sullivan said. "I think Una English also holds this view and, hopefully, it will be possible to make up a strong team.

"With Catherina McKiernan available, it probably made sense to concentrate on the longer of the two races, but now that she is not running things have changed."

Marie McMahon, mentioned as a possible member of a team at the shorter distance, is staying in America to compete in the National Collegiate championships, while Sinead Delehunty is understood to be going to California for warm-weather training.

That reduces the options significantly and yet the consensus is that with O'Sullivan and English currently in such good form, it would be foolhardy to sacrifice the chance of medals in the 4.8 kilometres event.

Reflecting on her win in Canberra, on a course saturated by an overnight thunderstorm, O'Sullivan said that she was delighted with her form. "It was my first run since finishing altitude training in Victoria Falls and I was anxious to see how it would affect my performance," she said.

"As it turned out, I have seldom felt stronger or more relaxed in a race. There wasn't a lot of pace on early in the race and when I decided to quicken it on the second of three laps I was able to do so without problems."

O'Sullivan will now run in a 3,000 metres track race in Auckland on February 21st. After that she will compete over 5,000 metres at Melbourne and Sydney on February 25th and 28th respectively, before returning to London at the start of next month.

The build-up to the National Indoor championships at Nenagh next weekend was heightened with some splendid performances by Irish athletes in Britain and Belgium over the weekend.

UCD's David Matthews chose to run at an international meting in Ghent in preference to the British Indoor championships in Birmingham and was rewarded with a convincing 800 metres win in 1.47.93.

The top Irish performance in Birmingham was recorded by Nenagh's Joe Naughton who won the heptathlon with 5,384 points, the second-best performance ever by an Irish athlete in the event.

Lena Barry of Limerick finished second to Joyce Maduaka in the 60 metres in 7.48 seconds, while James Nolan was a close second in the 800 metres in 1.48.11, setting the scene for a showdown with Matthews in Nenagh.

Pierce O'Callaghan (UCD) was second in the 3,000 metres walk and another UCD representative, Antoine Burke, finished in front of Mark Mandy for the first time when taking the silver medal in the high jump with career best figures of 2.24 metres.