The hard-drinking teen who turned into a world-beater
As a little girl setting out on a big adventure, Sonia O'Sullivan hit the ground running.
In her new memoir, My Story, she recalls: "I raced from lamp-post to lamp-post on the walk home from school, trying to get from start to finish quicker than a car which I would randomly pick from the passing traffic.
"I raced friends through the gardens and up and down the hills of Cobh. Racing. Racing. Racing."
Hewn from the same local granite as Roy Keane, the schoolgirl racer fused discipline, talent and a furious will to win. Like Keane, she too had an allergic reaction to resting on laurels.
"The joy is brief," she says, revealing that no sooner had she crossed the line to become World 5,000m Champion in 1995, than her euphoria was banished by the "awkward and embarrassing" chore of the lap of honour.
A teen sensation, she left on a coveted sports scholarship to Villanova University. Villanova pitched itself as the finishing school of Ronnie Delany and Eamonn Coughlan, but that meant little to a youngster devoted to Liverpool FC.
She'd have been more impressed "if Kenny Dalglish had gone to Villanova".
The plan was for Sonia to return fine-tuned for sporting greatness.
Instead, after a frustrating period blighted by injury, she arrived in Cobh intent on "trying to misspend my youth". She took up drinking, "staying out really late", and lounging in front of the telly.
One night she met Coochie Ireland, father of future refusnik international footballer Stephen Ireland.
There was a local road race coming up, and Coochie jibed Sonia that she wouldn't have a chance. Why not, she asked.
He replied: "Sure aren't you in here every night drinking pints!" That barstool wager put Sonia back on track to a glittering career that would bring a World and three European Championships, two World Cross-Country titles, and an Olympic Silver Medal at the Syd- ney Olym- pics.
While not, strictly speaking, the end of Sonia's time on the track, her Silver in Sydney has become the heart- warming fairytale ending to a story that was sliding into deep horror.
Even the story's bright start had been dimmed by a glaring case of daylight robbery.
Emerging as a force to be feared in 1993, Sonia was hot favourite for both the 3,000m and 1,500m at the World Championships.
Instead, a cluster of Chinese runners appeared from nowhere, ran speeds that were literally unbeliev-able, and made off never to be seen again.
The belief that Sonia had been robbed of two golds was cemented shortly afterwards, when a Chinese woman smashed the World 10,000m record by 42 seconds.
Sonia recalls: "She ran the second half 11 seconds faster than the world record for 5,000m, and the final 3,000m five seconds faster than the world record for that distance.
"In a single race, she bettered three world records."
Sonia asks: "Did what happened with the Chinese girls in 1993 cost me the Olympics in 1996?" She answers: "Not really."
But she then admits that she became obsessed with preparing herself for whatever the supercharged Chinese would throw at her in the future, eventually pushing her body to the point where it simply gave up on her.
At first, her all-out training regime (100-plus miles a week, 400 sit-ups watching telly) brought new peaks of performance and she tumbled records for fun. But besides pushing herself to the limit during working hours, Sonia and her "ABC" (Agent. Boyfriend. Coach.) Kim McDonald, spent their leisure time in an intense (and arguably insane) sporting rivalry.
Because McDonald couldn't match her at running, they took up cycling.
One day, after Sonia's gruelling training, they raced for two hours "killing ourselves".
She asks: "Is this something a top coach should be doing?"
She admits her relationship with McDonald was going nowhere from the start, but it fitted in with her obsessive routine. Indeed, the relationship looks like a trap that Sonia set for herself from the start, when as a girl she joined the local sports club for its disco, but then stayed home from the disco because it would damage her training.
At the Atlanta Olympics she laughed as a bulked-up Michelle Smith ran riot.
A week later she sobbed uncontrollably as her body packed in before 83,000 spectators and she scurried down an exit with two laps to go.
Distraught, she literally ran out of the stadium, jogging the seven miles back to her lodge in tears.
The most compelling part of Sonia's story tells of the long, dark months that followed when she slipped into deep depression, convinced that people were spreading rumours about her personal life, and that the world judged her a failure.
"It was lonely, so lonely," she recalls.
On Christmas Day: "The highlight was when I went for a run. I just cooked myself dinner and that was it."
And then the redemption. She climbed out of the pit and won her Olympic medal.
On a personal level she found true love with Nic Bideau (after a triangular tussle involving runner Cathy Freeman), married, and had two beautiful daughters.
And with all that, the loneliness of this remarkable middle-distance runner comes to a happy end.
My Story by Sonia O'Sullivan, with Tom Humphries, is published by Penguin Ireland
