The Atlanta Olympics should have been the first hint that something was happening. It was there Gary Ryan came from nowhere to somewhere.

In the damp heat of the Olympic Stadium little epiphanies had begun to appear around the track. They were not of biblical proportions.

No parting seas or burning bushes just a frisson of something different, something unfamiliar. Unknown Irish athletes were turning up in their green singlets for sprint events, and TJ Kearns aside, they were successfully avoiding the glorious but failed efforts that had become firstround Irish Olympic tradition. They caught the eye, flickered momentarily and then faded.

Susan Smith was there and glowed for longer than most, not yet lauded for her ever-improving ability over 400 metres hurdles. Gary Ryan and Neil Ryan were also discovered amongst the sprint lists, initially causing a mild stirring in the media enclosure.

"Were they related?" went the buzz. "The two Ryans?"

"No," was the answer.

"Well, there goes that story."

While Smith went on to the semi-final and Ryan through two rounds of his 200 metres event, it was significantly more than anyone had expected.

More importantly it constituted a breakthrough for Irish athletes.

Gary Ryan had not been involved in serious athletics 12 months previously.

He had been running around with a soccer team and kicking around with athletics. Proficient at both, exceptional at neither; they were good times, but neither career was moving. "That year I'd come from a legal personal best (PB) of 21.63 seconds to run 21.17 seconds in the Olympics. So I was able to go from nothing to somewhere in a very short space of time. "That was purely from the fact that Hayley and Drew Harrison got me training in Limerick. I had shown promise but had never really put the effort in before.

"After the run in the Olympics I was shocked. Riding around after the games I thought it was a dream. I thought this wasn't real and that at some stage I was going to wake up. It caught me by surprise."

On his road to Atlanta the then 24-year-old Ryan had also collected the Irish 100 metres record in a run in Lithuania. His time did not redraw the international sprinting landscape but marked him out as something more than a rough gem.

Two rounds of the World Championships and a new 20.69 second Irish record made Athens a success last summer; a fourth in the World Student Games in Sicily again shaved the record to 20.67. All this with one year's full training. In the heavyweight division of track, Ryan is punching above his weight.

At 5ft 9in, only the Scot Dougie Walker is his height amongst the top European runners, commonly six inches taller. It is also the dirty end of athletics where muscle mass counts, where drugs can take you further than you can imagine. It is where people like Denis Mitchell thrive.

Mitchell was until two weeks ago head of the athletes' advisory board to USA athletics, and what Americans proudly call a role model. He's now a proven dope cheat.

Ireland, with the talent of Ryan, Smith, Karen Shinkins, Lena Barry, Emily Maher, Paul Brizzel, Thomas Coman, Aoife Ahearne, Grainne Redmond, Fiona Norwood and Ciara Sheehy and the pods of talented sprinters now emerging from all corners, are with their technical progress dipping their toes into shark-infested waters. It is the name of the game at the top end of the sport, both an issue and a non-issue for all athletes.

"What anyone else is doing whether illegally or not, I can't affect, I can't change. I'm not going to lose any sleep over it although, yeh, it can be frustrating," says Ryan.

"It's not up to me to do something about it. It's up to the authorities. "Whether they will or not is another question. I can only do this for myself. I'm in this sport for me. I'm in it to prove how good I can be and not what anything or anyone else can be. Once I know that it's all genuine and that Gary Ryan has done this then I can be happy with myself. "If I finish last in Budapest and if I've run well and if I know I've done what I can achieve then I can't complain. If every other single competitor is on drugs, then there is nothing I can do about that. Maybe in the future if I can help change and root out these people who are taking drugs then I'd love to try and do that. "As an athlete there is nothing I can do except keep my own integrity and try and compete. I know I've competed against guys on drugs. I know that.

"And I know I've beaten them. I've gone out and beaten them. "It's like when you were a kid. Some guy is on a bike and you're running and he's trying to beat you on the bike and you still beat him. It's kinda that kind of a spirit.

"Last week I had to laugh a little bit because three Greeks and two Cypriots ran five of the 10 best times in Europe this year in one race in Athens.

"It just seemed a bit dodgy to me."

The Irish record over 200 metres has now fallen three times to Ryan and if major championships are athletes' most important canvasses, the European Championships this week in Budapest should again draw out his talent.

As an admirer of Smith, who has never failed to improve at a major and once again showed her ability to peak at the right time by renewing the Irish record two weeks ago, Ryan sees room to extend himself.

"I watch some of the really good competitors and I think Susan Smith is a great competitor, someone to learn from. She takes every single race one by one. She doesn't make any predictions. I speak to her pretty often. Susan is someone I greatly admire, someone who is actually breaking the mould in a sense. "I think there has been a mindset that middle and long distance running is all that we're good at, all that we'll ever be good at. The actual truth about that is it's changing, that in middle distance records haven't been broken for perhaps a dozen years in the men's side while all the records in the sprints and the jumps are being broken every year. "I think we are making great strides. We're catching up. In a couple of years maybe Ireland can win a medal in one of the technical events and the whole thing will change around."

The implicit inference is that, Smith aside, the current Irish sprinters are not quite at the medal end of the European table.

But Ryan does not see that as a reason to bridle his aspirations. Nor does he offer it to mean anything more than improvement is necessary, not impossible.

His transition from the football ground of Waterford City to the Olympic Stadium in a six-month period in 1996 remains a spur. The achievements of the Scot, Walker, who has this year breathlessly emerged from the rump of 200 metre runners to dominate the distance, has offered possibilities.

Walker is currently the number one in Europe. He is a sprinter that Ryan was able to beat last year. Easily. This year Walker has run a 20.3, establishing himself as one the Budapest favourites.

"I can match that," he says. "You've got to think like that. I like to think of semi-finals or finals, the last 16. That will take a 20.3.

"Those runs at the Olympic Games, the World Championships and the World Student Games were exhilarating and it's something I'm trying to get back again - that total disregard for the limits that you might put on yourself. "In 1996 I just went out and ran and things happened. To achieve that little bit more than you could have expected is one of the greatest feelings ever."

Finishing off his masters in biomechanics, Ryan looks to next week as the beginning of the next two years leading up to Sydney 2000. He has sampled the Hungarian track before and found it a little too giving. Not ideal for fast times. The 200 metre schedule is also prejudiced against a blistering final time, squeezing in four races over two days.

"I learned at the World Student Games, which had a similar timetable to Budapest, that people will not run their best in the semifinal and the final. The qualifiers and finals are packed into two days. "That's quite a short space of time. Also, I've run in Budapest. It's not a particularly good track. It's too soft. It's like what we'd call a training track.

"It's difficult to put a number on what times I'd need to get but I'll know after the first race. I'll put pressure on myself.

"I'm good under pressure and I react to it."

At this stage Irish sprinting remains the uninteresting gawky cousin.

Sonia O'Sullivan, up or down, is what continues to liven up track and field hoolies. Catherina McKiernan running 26 miles will pull revellers onto the dance floor because she'll always be there at the end.

Middle and long distance runners have proven themselves to be natural attention seekers.

It comes with the talent: Eamon Coghlan, Ray Flynn, Frank O'Mara; and the 100 times sub-four-minute miler Marcus O'Sullivan has not faded from memory.

Ireland likes winners. And the public have a well developed sense of knowing which heads will carry garlands on finals day. As the unpolished cousin matures into a less gauche adolescent, Budapest could be the championships where Smith makes a breakthrough to the podium and takes her place with O'Sullivan and McKiernan. It could be where Ryan also delivers. Both are at the cutting edge and in a sense they have been cast as role models for a new era as Irish sprinting finally joins the athletic assembly line. But how long for medal success?

"I think it depends on the next crop of people which emerges and how they apply themselves. Before I qualified for the Olympics I don't think an Irish sprinter had gone to any major championships since before the war," says Ryan.

We are now seeing the first models fall out of the factory door.

They carry the stamp guaranteed Irish, which in itself is a coming of age.