Sonia O'Sullivan will travel to Zurich tomorrow week in the hope of re-discovering the form which deserted her so dramatically at Sheffield on Sunday.
O'Sullivan confirmed yesterday that she will run the 1,500 metres in the Weltklasse after rejecting an offer to compete at the same distance in the Monte Carlo Grand Prix.
With no suitable 3,000 metres races available, it is not her preferred choice, but she is adamant that, after her Swiss assignment, she will not run again before the European Championships, opening at Budapest on August 18th.
"It was always my intention to run just once between Sheffield and the European Championships and it seems to me that Zurich is the place to do it," she said.
Her emphatic defeat at the hands of Britain's Paula Radcliffe in Sheffield in a pedestrian time of eight minutes 45.8 seconds for 3,000 metres was yet another in a series of bewildering crises which have punctuated her career in the last couple of years.
Having run comfortably in the early stages, she inexplicably dropped off the pace to fall some 30 metres behind Radcliffe. And yet, she was strong enough to outsprint Ayelech Worku of Ethiopia and Zhor el Kamche of Morocco for second place when Radcliffe had already crossed the line.
"It wasn't a question of Paula injecting more pace into the race - more a matter of my just falling away at 1,000 metres," she said. "Physically, I was fine, but for some reason I just lost concentration. After that, it was a matter of just getting around.
"Just why it happened, I don't know. Maybe I was distracted. But it was a low-key race and hopefully it will be different when the real racing starts in Budapest."
O'Sullivan, who has targeted the 5,000 metres as her big objective in Hungary, has yet to decide if she will also take on the 10,000 metres. The Irish squad is scheduled to be announced early next week.
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