"My parents are around somewhere," she said. "I'm surprised my father's not here telling you all nobody died." It was one of several references to the extraordinary past which served as prologue to yesterday's achievement. For Sonia O'Sullivan the road to Sydney has been long and winding and started out with cow paths.

She began running as a kid in Cobh and the love of it infected her blood from an early age. She dodged colds to keep running. She memorised maths theorems as she ran. She splashed her way through muddy, cow dung-laden fields and kept running.

She was always good. Good going on phenomenal. Aged 18, she headed off to Villanova for an athletics scholarship that would almost make her and almost break her. She clashed over training methods with head coach Marty Stern and won an concession to be allowed train on grass. She achieved a qualifying time for the Seoul Olympics but missed out through injury.

By Barcelona in 1992 she had become World Student Games champion and had been to the NCAA finals for Villanova. 1993 was a year of some achievement yet will be remembered for the World Championships in Stuttgart where she was the most high-profile victim of Ma Junren's Family Army. Squeezed to fourth in the 3,000 metres, she told everyone the week wasn't finished yet and produced a remarkably resilient race to take silver in the 1,500. She was European 3,000 metres champion the following year, running 8.31 in a race which she describes as tactically perhaps the best she has run. By then she was in her prime and was practically unbeatable through 1994 and 1995, a run of dominance which led to the World 5,000 metre Championship in Gothenburg.

The subsequent years are well documented. Increasingly a martyr to her own impossible training scheme, she became run down and paid the price in Atlanta through the course of a disastrous week when the sight of her tears became a familiar one in Irish living-rooms. "Nobody died," her father famously told a group of gaping pressmen.

That week was pivotal in making the bond that exists between her and the Irish public. She was overwhelmed at times by the response she received. The Olympics also marked the end of her personal relationship with coach and manager Kim McDonald.

In 1997, she made an unhappy trip to the World Cross Country championships, where she got a bronze medal in the team event but ran with disastrous naivete in the race itself. She linked up with her current coach, Alan Storey, but his charm hadn't worked sufficiently to spare her from a mentally bruising trip to the World Championships in Athens that summer. She spoke to Storey immediately after her second disaster that week and he told her that she needed to set a target for herself in 1998 and get on with working towards that.

She did. In March 1998, she went to Marrakesh and won both World Cross Country titles on offer, an achievement which was matched later in the year when she ran in the Europeans in Budapest and took the 5,000 and 10,000 metres titles.

She took a year out in 1999 to give birth to Ciara, returning to training last winter in Australia.

She runs in the 10,000 metres heat tomorrow more confident and more relaxed than she has been in half a decade.