On track to achieve gold glory

Sonia O'Sullivan's Olympic plans were firmly in place yesterday after she imposed her class on inferior opposition to win the Australian 10,000 metres championship in Sydney's pristine Olympic Stadium.

Not only did the win give her another Australian title but her time of 31 minutes 43.32 seconds, an Australian all-comers record, was comfortably inside the Olympic qualifying standard of 32 minutes 30 seconds.

Coupled with her achievement in running a qualifying time for the 5,000 metres last week, it means that she can now go to the World Cross-Country Championships in the Algarve next month content in the knowledge that her Olympic programme is on schedule.

With the exception of a couple of athletes, O'Sullivan was always going to be running at a different pace to those who lined up with her at the start of yesterday's race. And so it proved as the field began to break up after just four of the 26 laps.

O'Sullivan's strategy was to go out at 75-second lap pace for the first 2,000 metres. It meant that only the Australian Claire Fearnley was in contention as the race reached its halfway point.

Fearnley, who had finished second to O'Sullivan over 5,000 metres last week, may have sensed that the Irishwoman, a mere novice at this event, had limited stamina and for the next 1,200 metres she took the pace with O'Sullivan some three metres behind. If the hope was to break O'Sullivan, the tactic misfired for the Australian. Soon O'Sullivan was back in front and widening the gap with each consecutive lap in difficult conditions of heat and humidity and a boisterous wind which blew up just before the start of the race.

"I have to be satisfied with my performance," O'Sullivan said after the race, "for I came to Australia in the first place to get my Olympic qualifying times in both the 5,000 and 10,000 metres. The 10,000 was always going to be the difficult bit, for I am still only learning the event and I'm not yet able to pace the race correctly.

"It's a long distance when you're running out front on your own, but with more good athletes around me, I know that I am capable of much faster figures than I produced today.

"This was only my second 10,000 metres run. And unless there is need to revise the plan, I won't run again at this distance before I come back to Sydney for the Games in the autumn."

Now she will attempt to win another world title in the cross-country class in Portugal. As yet, she is undecided on whether she will concentrate on the long course championship or take her place with some of Europe's fastest middle distance runners in the shorter event over 4.8 kilometres.

"That depends on my chat with my coach, Alan Storey, tomorrow," she said. "At the moment I feel I am in good enough shape to run well at either distance, but I'll wait and see what Alan has to say before deciding on my programme."

Apart from everything else, yesterday's race on the first day of the three-day Australian championships gave O'Sullivan the chance of familiarising herself with the experience of running in the stadium in which she hopes to strike gold next September. But as it turned out there were very few spectators present to see her stamp her superiority on the race.

"A stadium only becomes an Olympic stadium when there is an Olympic-type crowd inside it," she said. "And today it was far from that."

O'Sullivan plans to remain in Sydney for a couple of days before returning to Melbourne and she hopes to watch Breda Dennehy run well in the final of the 5,000 metres championship on Sunday.