SOME days in summer. Some races. One press conference. Many tears. The kind of trouble she'd been fearing the most. She came home last week carrying not medals but the most celebrated innards in Irish medical history. Every step brought an inquiry, gentle hands placed on her wrist, the depths of her stare sought out.

"How are you Sonia?"

"Oh fine thanks, thanks very much."

"Feeling better Sonia?"

"Great, great. Thanks for asking."

"You're looking better. Did you get the sun Sonia?"

It is a boom time for theories. The theories market hasn't been so bouyant since JFK went to Dallas in a car and came back in a box. Everybody has a theory on Sonia O' Sullivan.

Her sister Gillian rang one day.

"What's all this then Sonia?"

"What's all what?"

"You. They're saying that you're pregnant. Is it true?"

No. That one isn't true either.

Theories. One for everybody in the audience. Sonia was pregnant. Sonia had her heart broken. Sonia was betrayed by her thoroughbred flightiness. Sonia was hexed by Wang Junxia. Sonia had tests and eerily they showed nothing. Sonia had her food poisoned by the wicked American media who did for Michelle Smith...

If she could fill one of those theories with a good blast of air she'd surely set sail in it herself Nothing worse than to see yourself undone by a wrinkle, tripped by a detail, beaten by a common or garden urinary tract infection. Better to have been smited by an all-conquering force of nature, consumed by a ravine, crushed in an avalanche, sucked up by a tornado.

Theories. Rumours. Yarns.

On the Sunday night when she dropped out of the 5000 metres final glowing with sweat and pinched with anxiety she ran the seven miles home to her rented Atlanta house with Kim McDonald, her friend and agent.

A grim 50 minutes of tidal emotions. Cathartic too, as it turned out. Kim making her run slowly, taking her through the tears and the immediate past.

"If I'd left on my own I'd have been gone. Just gone."

Kim coaxed her to talk through everything, encouraged her to stay strong. By the time she hit the front porch her head was already focussed on the 1500 metres heats later in the week.

Within days she heard a different account of that run. She'd had to stop, sobbing and shaking, by the side of the road four, five, six times to evacuate her bowels. Ah, the romance of the Games.

She knows it shouldn't be like this. After years of the most meticulous and perfectly executed preparation she shouldn't be riding the carousel of rumour.

On her first trip home last week, she should have been waving medals around the place, travelling the chat-show circuit. Instead she did a little work for GOAL, went home to her family and then passed a few days in Limerick subjecting herself to a battery of physiological tests.

"The tests will give me a new approach to training next year. Some new ways of looking at things, some new targets. I probably need that. Need to get back to planning the future."

And all those who have feared that Sonia O'Sullivan might be a young woman with a great future behind her will probably nod their amens to that.

SOME DAYS in summer. She can't trace the root of it. Up in Philadelphia in July some track sessions with Marcus O'Sullivan just came badly undone. She couldn't do some things which she had always done. Alarm bells rang. She put her hands over her ears.

"If it was windy I'd blame the wind. If it was hot I'd blame the humidity. Marcus would say I was bound to feel bad before a big race. I'd think Yeah. But not this far before a big race.'

Nothing specifically wrong. Just an absence of the comfort. A tugging at the sleeve of her confidence. She told herself to relax. Marcus told her to relax. She relaxed.

She has been asked a million times since why she didn't have doctors swarming all over her like archaeologists. She has only one answer. An old story.

One winter in the early 1980s, a cold consumed and smothered her. She kept running, though. She coughed her guts out past the hedgerows and ditches of Cobh. She leaned against lamp posts and caught her breath between convulsions of coughing. On her hunkers, hands resting on damp grass she coughed till she felt her head would fall off. She could have skipped school but skipping school would have entailed skipping running.

Home again and she'd double up just beyond earshot of the house and cough some more. Then she'd knock on the door and hold her breath all evening in case she'd attract attention. Go to bed and cough into the deep fold of a pillow. The worst thing in the world would be to tell anyone.

"It's just like when you have a problem and you share it it gets to be a bigger problem. Everyone wants to do something. Everyone gets involved."

The runner's cocoon has no room for everyone or anyone. Sonia remembers meeting her old foe Wang Junxia in the tunnel before the 5000 metres final and shaking her hand and Wang reached out and locked stares warmly and seemed friendlier than Sonia had ever seen her before.

"I remember thinking than she was different. She wanted to be friendly. I wondered if she was so friendly could she be as competitive as she was?"

Competitiveness has always been her index for judging runners.

Her heat of the 5000 metres in Atlanta two days before the final had the same complexion as her heat in Gothenburg at the world championship a year previously. The same girl, Sarah Wedlund, out in front hoping to break the field. Sonia feared her in much the way that wolves fear sheep. Except this summer for the longest time when Wedlund opened the gap, Sonia hadn't the energy to chase.

"Winning that heat took a lot but I bust had to show how competitive I was. Definitely I believe if there was only one race in Atlanta there would have been no problem. That race took a lot more out of me than it should have."

The night after the heat, not for the first time this summer, she awoke drenched in sweat. So cold and wet that she could wring her T-shirt out and watch the drops fall to the floor. She changed her bedclothes and T-shirt and went back to bed. Never said a word.

On the morning of the final itself, Sonia and Frank O'Mara had a run out near the Olympic cycling venue. Ten minutes into the run Frank was jogging outside a women's toilet waiting for his companion to emerge again.

The details of the 5000 metres final are burned onto the national memory.

The expectations. The early jostling. The jolt of that alarming close-up of Sonia O'Sullivan's face glowing with sweat. The sudden bolt down the tunnel in a corner of the stadium. The tears. The discomfort of us watching her tears. We remember it from the outside in. She has the other perspective.

"I never felt good that night. We were just playing games with the pace a bit. I'd normally love that but I felt bad. I hadn't the energy to make any moves.if I did I couldn't hold onto my position."

So for she first time that she could remember, she quit. She took a lap to decide on her options. Get right for the 1500. Leave via the tunnel where the press can't see you. She disappeared.

"There were people in the tunnel. I was upset and the officials wanted to bring me to the medical room. I said `No. I'm fine.' Then I decided it was best to get myself together. I stayed a while before I went out and faced people.

"I walked off the track and I had no idea what had happened. Just saying to myself `What did I just do?' No answers. In the end, the officials led me down to where all the press were anyway.

"I just didn't have anything to say. I couldn't say anything. I saw Kim and my family over the railings. I went over and just asked them what happened, what went wrong?"

She remembers waking up the following morning from a deep sleep brought on by nervous exhaustion and asking herself again and again if this had really happened. Glued to the bed.

"I thought I wouldn't be able to just get up and go out and continue as if Sunday night hadn't happened."

Monday brought the infamous press conference in the bowels of the Atlanta media centre. A press conference of two halves. She felt then and says now that she should never have been there for the whole thing.

"Yes. I should have been let go after the first half of the press conference. Definitely. All I wanted was to say thank you and tell people that I was running the 1500. I just wanted to explain the going the to the bathroom problem."

"Pat (Hickey) had come out to the house to ask what the plan of action was. I said `Maybe I'll do that first and then you can go with your gear stuff or maybe what if you do your gear stuff first and I do my bit' but it just came down to the thing where they wanted to link the two of them together."

"I didn't think it would be a big deal. I don't think I was being used. I think I just made a bad decision. I was warned before that it was possibly going to be a big deal and I said `No, what can the big deal be about?'"

Afterwards she lunched with her parents and talked confidently of the rest of the week. The previous evening the emotion had vanished by the time she had run home. She was running the 1500. End of story. Introspection could wait.

"The 5000 has haunted me ever since but once I decided in Atlanta that I was doing the 1500, I thought was going to run and win the heat and everything. I was very positive going into it. I thought it was the best thing to be positive."

She declined to do anything more than speak briefly to Dr Joe Cummiskey about what was ailing her. "To be honest Joe is so meticulous it scared me. I said `he is going to find something wrong with me, because, well, there is probably something wrong with me and then he isn't going to let me run the 1500 and that's not how I want to not win the 1500.' If it's going to end, I want it to be on the track."

It ended on the track. The 1500 metre heat evaporated before her eyes. Her legs felt skittery and weak. She was conscious of the other runners watching her waiting for her to uncoil her strength, then appreciated their feral realisation that Sonia just didn't have it today. They set about carving her up. She'd have done the same herself.

She came off, got selected for a drug test on a day when she could easily have filled the specimen jars with tears. She sent somebody to get her bags from the mixed zone this time so she wouldn't have to face the world. And there the Olympics finished.

She lingered, though, stuck to the scene. She went to the warm-up track with Kim and Frank. Decided to go back into the Olympic stadium again but felt she had no right to. "You feel like a criminal when you lose like that."

For a few days she hung around Atlanta like a prisoner confined to the city limits. Just about everyone she knew in the world was in Atlanta. Nobody to run to anywhere else. She spent her time in the house with Kim and Frank avoiding the humiliation of condolences.

"I cried a bit after the 5000 metres but I had a second chance. After the 1500 I just didn't know what to do. That cleaned me out. I'd stay in the house doing nothing. When you come back out into the world and see everyone they're asking how you are and you are saying `fine, fine, fine' and it seems that you can't tell anyone about the four years you spent getting ready for this, nobody knows how you are really feeling. I became very good at disguising it.

"At the house I'd be terrible then if my mother and father would call or if I was going to meet somebody I'd say `OK Sonia, turn the lights back on again'. Didn't want everyone else involved in the whole thing."

Wanting nobody else involved. Back to where she started. Maybe character is fate after all.

Continued in Weekend 2