Listening to a new Storey

In Honolulu last autumn Sonia O'Sullivan found recovery in a one-mile road race. Following a recent injury, her coach Alan Storey did not want her to compete in what was a low key event. Inevitably, O'Sullivan's stubborn streak prevailed and she ran, but not until she took on Storey's advice of preparing to accept the result of the race however it turned out. She finished well down and was in her own words "all pissed off".

Sonia then sat down with Storey and listened. From then until now she has continued to listen. That has been a giant step for Ireland's only world champion runner. She listens to her English coach. He watches her run. The simple formula has made rehabilitation possible.

Now O'Sullivan is talking the talk the way it used to be. She's letting in more light and showing a confidence that had over the past two years been buried. No longer despair or confusion. No longer the broad smile hiding a mountain of frailties and a battered self worth. The destruction of her vitality and hungry confidence during the Olympic games in Atlanta and the World Championships in Athens have been repaired and strengthened by Storey and by her wonderful dominance of both distances in the World Cross Country Championships in Marrakesh last March. World records are now on her lips.

"I'm going to run over two miles at the Cork City Sports in June," she says. "The reason I decided to go over that distance is because in the 3000m if you want to break the world record you need to be going around on a pair of skates or a bike, whereas over two miles you could probably go with your eyes closed and still break that record.

"So all things going well, and my legs moving as well as they are now, and as well as they were at the World Cross Country Championships, and if I don't get beaten, then . . .

". . . Then it's something for me to think about - to try and break the world record. Otherwise you just go and you run around and it doesn't really mean anything. It's nice that the race means something. It gives me something to look forward to and it makes me think about it more and I suppose it creates that bit of excitement."

There are no real differences in O'Sullivan's method except that she has off-loaded some of the baggage she used to carry herself. As she puts it: "other people take care of things." In tandem with a more relaxed approach to her summer schedule much of the pressure has lifted and, while her focus remains on the European Championships in Budapest in August, she feels that it will come to her rather than her nervously moving towards it.

"I was looking at a sheet with all of the races on it for the summer and I was talking to my coach about which ones to run in," she says. "He was talking about a race in July and wondering if this was one too many. He said: `okay I'll leave the sheet with you and you can think about it'. I said: `listen, all I want to know is my first race and after that you can tell me the next one'. "I said to him that I needed a general idea but I don't need to know that I'm running ten races and where and what they are."

O'Sullivan will run in St Denis in Paris and then probably a 1500m in Bratislava. After that she's not sure until the Cork City Sports at the end of June. After that the season begins in earnest. Expectations have been heaped on her since Atlanta. Now she has begun to load them on herself. Folly? With two gold medals in her bag Sonia, as ever, knows best.