She has always been our girl. In good days and bad days there has always been the sense of connection between Sonia O'Sullivan and Ireland. She has grown up before our eyes. To watch her last night was heartbreaking.

Seven summers. Stepping stones through the national memory. From Split in 1990 to Athens in 1997, Sonia has always been part of the yearly ration of sunshine. We got used to her being a prospect, then became accustomed to the sight of her happy, garlanded victory laps.

For 12 months now we've been coming to terms with the fact that something is wrong. She came into the media area last night like a lost soul, defeat in her eyes, pallor in her cheeks. She talked for the longest time with a friend and a BLE official, keeping her back to the media, hoping the questions would just evaporate. In a way they had. Last night provided just one answer. No more questions.

"I know there must be something wrong," she said. "I thought I would be OK."

When she spoke to us her eyes flicked nervously from journalist to journalist, noting the chroniclers of her grief. You'd like to think that Sonia liked you, because in Sonia there is a visible decency and your self-esteem rises barometrically if you think she rates you. She is one of those people. Possibly there are those who despise her, but we have yet to encounter that constituency. To meet her is to care for her.

Last night, to be near her, gathering the quotes, was to be sad. She spoke softly and poignantly about how accustomed she was becoming to these bad nights, facing the tape recorders with tears in her eyes and wondering what and where it has all gone wrong. To watch her last night as she laboured through the second half of an ordinary race was a trial. Journalists shook their heads and didn't want to write about it. A melancholy evening in the crush of the mixed zone.

She took in the faces. Same old cafflers. There is a sense of vulnerability which Sonia exudes even at the moments when she seems most in control, a vulnerability which hints at a complexity which no journalist has come near to unravelling.

"I do it because I love it," she said last night. "I just love it. But it didn't work out," and her lips quivered and she shrugged and turned and walked off down the corridor on her own wearing her white T-shirt and green shorts, carrying her running shoes in her hand. A prisoner of the thing she loves the most.

She has always seemed charmingly unsure of her relationship with the Irish public. Metaphorically and, at times, literally, she has refused to wave the Tricolour or to push all the easy gra mo chroi buttons. After Atlanta and all that heartache last summer, she came home expecting, she said, to be despised as a failure. She was deeply moved when she came home at last and couldn't walk 10 yards without a well-wisher embracing her.

She spoke for a while after Atlanta about perspective and the good things in life. Next we heard she was running hard races again in Australia. Last night, after another soul-crushing defeat, she looked far away from the comforts of perspective.

Maybe she is 70 per cent of herself at present. She struggled all through the second half of this harmless qualifying race. Having taken a stint at the front during the first lap, her face was soon filling the huge screens in the Athens Olympic Stadium, her strained, pinched features mirroring those we saw in Atlanta last summer.

It shouldn't have been this way. These tracks are her home and her office. When you speak to her, she seldom refers to her business as athletics or track and field. She calls it racing. When she speaks about racing you can see the little girl who used run around the fields in Cobh carrying a chest full of phlegm and a bad head cold and then cough her guts up before she got in to face her mother.

"I thought it would work out," she said to us last night, "but I was just stuck to the track and I didn't know what was wrong."

She loves racing. She'll come in from heats often and be dissatisfied, because half the field has qualified and it was all tactics. "Now the real racing" can begin, she said last week after her 1,500 metres semi-final. Typical Sonia.

Racing has obsessed and almost literally consumed Sonia O'Sullivan. Yet as the song says, the very thing which makes her rich makes her poor.

She is not a woman who appreciates the philosophy of less is more. She reacts to every setback with a redoubling of efforts. When the Chinese materialised from nowhere in 1993 and beat her twice in Stuttgart, Sonia responded by doubling her training routine.

If more sweat and abstinence and penance will solve a problem, then Sonia will solve it. Through 1994 and 1995, blood, sweat and tears solved all problems. Sonia broke records, won medals and ran herself happily into the dust.

She came away from Atlanta last year with her life in ruins.

That may seem a lot to say about a mere sport. A lot to say about a 26-year-old woman. Yet running and racing is what Sonia O' Sullivan is. Running and her obsession with running is what defines her. From her toes to her head and what's inside it, she is an athlete.

It was awful to watch her this week. Having run like like a novice, Sonia was almost manic in her attempts to show a cheery face to the world after the calamity of the 1,500 metres final.

We wondered why she was pushing herself onwards towards more disaster. She was hoping - always hope - that she would feel better when she felt track tartan under her spikes again. She kept on till the track turned to glue.

Sonia looks like a woman who needs a long rest. She has always felt that the path to happiness lay in willing herself to do more. This week in Athens she looked tired, the ghosts of last summer still possessing her. Perhaps willing herself to do less for a while might restore her to happiness, if not greatness.

She told us that she would go away and assess things. She would talk to people close to her and then decide what to do. Nothing left to say. She left.

We journalists shook our heads and wondered if such a great crowd of us would ever gather to collect Sonia's post race thoughts again.