FOR many Americans it's a name as evocative as track star Michael Johnson or swimmer Janet Evans, who reports to the Olympic pool on Saturday in search of a sixth gold medal.

Mary Decker Slaney, the golden girl of American athletics for so long, has no Olympic medal to show for a career which, by any standard, is colourful and exciting.

But now, at the age of 37, she believes that she is capable of redressing that omission when she competes against Sonia O'Sullivan and Wang Junxia, among others, for the alluring prize of the 5,000 metres championship.

"I'm older and wiser and, perhaps, for the first time in my life learning how to race," she said. "For much of my career, I was the girl who liked to excite the crowd by running and winning from in front the traffic behind never really bothered me.

"But Olympic titles are not won like that. To succeed you've got to be able to mix it and at Los Angeles 12 years ago, I simply wasn't able to handle that situation."

That was the unforgettable occasion when her foot became entangled with that of Zola Budd immediately ahead of her and the hopes of millions of Americans collapsed with her as she lay writhing on the infield.

Some of her subsequent comments about Budd enraged the non American world an outburst which she now admits was a mistake.

"I said things then which wouldn't care to repeat in a similar situation now but then I was 12 years younger and a lot more outspoken.

"I've since learned when to bite the bullet, how to cope with disappointment. And I think I'm a better person for it."

Slaney has had ample opportunity to learn to adjust to the pangs of misfortune. Illness kept her out of the 1988 Games at Seoul and then she failed to qualify for Barcelona in the national trials four years later.

That situation was repaired in part when just eight months after the last of the 19 operations she has undergone since 1977, she unexpectedly came good in the 5,000m trial in Atlanta last month.

Even then, however, the past came back to haunt her when, challenging for the lead with 200 metres to go, she brought gasps from the crowd by tripping yet again. This time, however, she stayed upright and regained her composure sufficiently well to finish second.

The woman who ran her first marathon at the age of 14, and went on to set national records at every distance from 800m to 10,000m, has, indeed, mellowed with the years.

Where once her training schedules astonished even male athletes, she has now cut back on training to the point where it borders at times on recreational.

"Yes, I once trained like a demon but not any longer. I always believed that the harder I worked, the better I would be but that is not necessarily the case.

"Some athletes leave their best performances on the training grounds and with the benefit of bitter experience, I can now admit it perhaps, I was one of them.

Compared to Sonia O'Sullivan, Slaney has not set the athletics world alight with the quality of her pre-Olympic performances which, apart from that Atlanta run, were not overly impressive. Yet, she believes that she has good a chance as any of crossing the line first in the 5000m final.

"I don't agree with those who say that the person who beats O'Sullivan will win the title," she says. "It's a wide open championship between five or six athletes and I think I'm entitled to rate as one of them."