Safe fourth place sees O'Sullivan through

Sonia O'Sullivan has arrived in the final of the 1500 metres championship, safely - if not without the occasional scare - after the opening two days of the World Championships in Athens.

Much of the doubt which surrounded her in recent months, began to dissipate after she marked her appearance in the Olympic Stadium by winning the first of three heats on Saturday.

And if her legs at times looked more suspect in last evening's semi-finals, she eventually got through comfortably enough when claiming the fourth of five qualifying places on offer in the first semi-final in a time of four minutes 05.31 seconds, some three seconds faster than her first run.

After the smooth authority of Saturday's success over the Russian, Olga Neiyubova, there was some disturbing evidence of the uneven running which characterised her precipitous fall from the top of the rankings last summer.

One of the last to respond to the starter's gun, she got back to sixth place at one stage, then drifted to ninth at the bell, only to renew her challenge for the lead off the last bend.

Even in the maelstrom of world championship competition, that was hard to rationalise. Undeniably, there were times when she lacked composure on the track but once the race was over, the persona had changed little from the glory days.

Here, there was none of the self-recrimination which moved her to tears in Atlanta. Now, she was perfectly in control and in no mood to offer facile excuses for flaws, real or imagined in her performance.

At times, it was almost too upbeat. But it still served to reassure those of us who had witnessed at first hand, the extent of her torment in the Olympic Games 12 months ago.

"Going into the last bend, I thought I would win the race," she said. "But then I realised that there were five of us clear and with five to qualify, there didn't seem to be much point in pushing it after that.

"I was able to work my way out of trouble when I needed to, found a lot of pace on the last lap and, in short, it was good preparation for the final".

A professional assessment of a difficult situation or a skilful exercise in window dressing? We must wait until the final tomorrow evening for a definitive answer and the debate in the intervening hours, promises to be intense.

"I felt good in my first race on Saturday and I felt even better today," she said. "Part of the challenge is getting used to the system and I'm much more at home with it here than in America last year.

"The purpose of the exercise was to stay in the championship and there was no point in burning up energy unnecessarily when I knew I was going to qualify.

"There was a lot of fighting out there, a lot of people determined to run as fast as they could, for as long as they could, to reach the final. That affected the way the race was run but yes, I thought I handled it well."

With 500 metres to go she had progressed to fifth but then, incredibly, appeared to chop her stride and lost three places over the next 100. That left her with a lot of hard running to do on the last lap but the manner of her response was positive and impressive.

By the top of the back straight, she was running so smoothly that it seemed only a matter of seconds before she arrived in the lead. That never happened, however, as first Neiyubova and then Portugal's Carla Sacramento held her surge. And in those fleeting moments, was born the great imponderable of the race.

O'Sullivan was adamant that she was running merely to qualify, but a couple of metres away in the mixed zone area, Sacramento was telling a somewhat different story and pointing to the psychological advantage of finishing ahead of the Irish woman. Now we must await the final before pronouncing judgement on O'Sullivan's remarkable transition from disillusionment to fulfilment in the space of just six weeks. And there is no betting on where public sympathies lie.

Encouragingly, the Olympic champion Svetlana Masterkova followed Kelly Holmes out of the 1500 metres championship when her suspect ankle gave out on the last lap of the second semi-final, won in some style by Sweden's Malin Ewerlof, whom O'Sullivan had beaten on Saturday.

Masterkova was last of the 12 finishers, with Sinead Delahunty just missing out on qualification when finishing seventh in her fastest time for 1997, 4:07.46. As ever, Delahunty was brave and unsparing in her application.