How did Monday begin? With a pot of tea and faked normality. Sonia and Nick went to the park for a run, neighbours took care of Ciara. The Olympian jogged easily for 20 minutes, her partner did more. Home and then a stretch. Eleven hours to the race. Eternity.
Alan Storey, her coach, is sharing the house they have rented in Sydney and he had already left for the stadium. One of the athletes he trains was running in the 1500m heats. They turned on the telly to watch but all they found was a softball match. Australia were playing and throughout the Games Channel 7 has been enraptured by the flag, wherever it fluttered. They watched the softball.
She dressed in everyday clothes and they went out for lunch. Nothing on the menu could entice her to eat; she drank coffee. At home she made a sandwich. That would do. Not a day for eating. "Then," she says, "it was nearly time to pack a bag." Mercy.
The warm-up track is behind the stadium, linked to it by a tunnel, separate but not isolated. Cathy Freeman's final was at 8.10 and every clap of thunder from the stadium could be heard: they didn't need to see the race to know the winner. Five minutes later they were summoned to the first call room.
To Storey's eyes, O'Sullivan was more relaxed than he ever could have hoped. Frank O'Mara would have expected no less. He trained under Storey for a couple of years and in Atlanta he shared a house with O'Sullivan. He has a sense for what Storey offers and what O'Sullivan needs and of all the things the coach would bring to her preparation he knew calmness would be among them.
The call rooms were silent except for the functional discourse of the officials and the television in the corner. The athletes crowded round to watch Michael Johnson's race and then dispersed to their own worlds again. Jo Pavey, the British runner, looked across at O'Sullivan and they exchanged hellos but she knew not to push the conversation further. Before the heat Pavey had helped pin O'Sullivan's number to her shorts and they chatted a little but now was a
different place in time. In single file they were marched onto the track.
On the start line the television camera came round to O'Sullivan and she greeted it with a smile: "Right before the start," she says, "I wasn't sure how I felt. It was definitely one of those situations where as soon as the gun went off I'd know how I was feeling. The gun went off and I was feeling really good. I was surprised at how good I felt."
The pace was slow but on the third lap she dropped back a little and by the fifth she was in trouble, 12th in the field, three from the back. She tells it as if it were a momentary faintness but it carried the menace of a black-out: "I don't know what it was. There was a gap came about and I don't know how I got myself back on again. It was like I closed my eyes for a minute, woke up and had to catch back on again. The thing that helped me was that even if I looked like
falling off I was never feeling very bad. I was always feeling good. It was just a case of me telling myself to be relaxed and be patient."
Watching from the stand Storey was perplexed. "She was suddenly in a position which I know she would have avoided if she could have. I knew if it was a serious problem that it would re-appear later on in the race so for a while I feared the worst. I still don't really know what happened. On the track your mind goes through a process and asks 'should I be going this hard or not?' The brain weighs up all the options and tries to make an assessment of how the body
feels. So it's really hard to say whether the problem was physical or mental."
O'Mara watched from the same distance and saw different forces at play: "She ran like she didn't believe in herself in the early laps. I thought she had a whole season in one race. She had only run one 5,000m this season before the Olympics and it had been disastrous. She had no consistency all year and it was like she had to build a history all in one race.
"As it got further into it and she was still there she started to believe in herself. When she started getting close to familiar territory she convinced herself she could do it. She's the world record holder for 2k and she's been running 1500m all her career, so when they got that far she was comfortable and the whole thing built from there.
"It's not atypical for runners with a history in 1500m to lose concentration going up in distance. In a 1500m race of three and a half laps you have to concentrate from the very start. At longer distances you're told to shut off your mind and I don't think that works for Sonia. She got away with it this time but she must have been within centimetres of dropping out."
O'Sullivan hung onto Pavey like a life raft and dragged herself back into the race. With seven laps to go she moved deliberately into sixth, demonstrating her well being to herself as much as to her rivals. Surviving the crisis was a watershed: in the race, in her career. Capitulation at the Olympics for a second time would surely have shattered her career beyond repair.
"It reminded me of Crystal Palace [in August]," says Storey. "She obviously wasn't right that day and it was much more difficult for her to carry on than to walk off. She could have said she had a calf problem and everybody would have sympathised. After Crystal Palace we sat in a warm-up area and she was distraught. There were 20,000 people in the stadium with a huge TV audience. She's an elite athlete and when the gun went she couldn't go. She felt
absolutely humiliated. After that only two things can happen: you pack it in or you try harder. On Monday night you saw which path she took."
The laps ran down and the plot took shape. Before the race they tried to forecast the most likely pattern, but half a dozen scenarios kept popping up, one as valid as the next. "I had a runner in the men's 10k final," says Storey, "and I could tell him three days before the race how it would be run. For Sonia's race I didn't have a clue."
The Kenyans often drive the pace from early on, but on Monday night their runners weren't strong enough to attempt it. The Ethiopians had the runners and a collective strategy but it misfired: "Sonia could hear them talking," says Storey, "and she could hear [Geta] Wami getting more and more agitated. In the end they had a shouting match." Wami and Ayelech Worku pushed the pace in the second kilometre but, in the final kilometre, Worku was delegated to get
to the front and up the pace again, hoping to burn off the sprinters and lay the race open for Wami. But by then the pace was too hot and Worku couldn't shovel any more coal on the fire.
"Sonia went into the race with an idea of all the things that could happen," says Storey, "but once it got to the last lap her racing brain kicked in." For O'Sullivan to win it needed to be a sprinter's finish; if it was a sprinter's finish Szabo was bound to be there. Before the race they would have accepted those conditions.
"When I came up on her shoulder," says O'Sullivan, "I felt she'd gone as well as she could and I thought I had it. Then she glanced over and she just moved up a little bit and that was it. There's a point when you're going as fast as you possibly can and you've run for so long and you're tired that you just can't get over the top of the person in front of you. It felt like the end of an 800m race where you're just
getting to the line as quick as you can."
Up on the big screen the statistics of an extraordinary race slowly revealed themselves. An Olympic record for Szabo; an Irish record for O'Sullivan, nearly 20 seconds inside the old Olympic record; seven runners under 14:50; 12 runners under 15 minutes: the best women's 5,000m ever run.
For 20 seconds she was stunned with exhaustion and concussed by defeat. Three members of the Irish back room team rushed down to the front of the stand and hung over the barrier behind the finish line trying to catch her eye with their elation. At last she saw them: "I'm wrecked," she said; she could say no more.
Slowly she embarked on her lap of honour. All week the second biggest roar in the stadium had been for Irish competitors and in every corner of the stadium there was an Irish flag. She reached the last bend when the medal ceremony for the women's 400m was announced and the stadium erupted again.
The conjunction of events couldn't have been insinuated with more melodrama. O'Sullivan's partner Nick Bideau had once been Freeman's coach, agent and lover. Their personal relationship ended four years ago and their professional one descended into acrimony and the civil courts earlier this year. All summer it had been a running story in the Australian media and now O'Sullivan and Freeman had to share precisely the same hour of glory.
O'Sullivan made her way along the front of the stand and reached the exit where half a dozen television reporters are lined up. The BBC are second in line but as they grabbed her Ryle Nugent of RTE shouted from the end of the queue and she dropped the BBC to join him, promising to return. He handed her a bottle of water and as she took it the Australian national anthem struck up in honour of Freeman's gold. O'Sullivan asked for a minute. Freeman's face filled the
giant screen to her right; O'Sullivan turned her back to the RTE camera and looked away at a right angle from the screen.
In the mixed zone the media frenzy enveloped her. Three hours after the race she still hadn't met her mother, Mary, or her sister, Gillian. They went to the press conference room waiting for her to be brought in, but Freeman's press conference was never ending and doping control took forever with the 5,000m runners. An hour after it was scheduled to happen the press conference was cancelled and O'Sullivan had left for the warm-up track to do a run.
It was after midnight when Mary and Gillian left the mixed zone, close to 1am when by a miracle of chance they came across Sonia, Nick and Alan in a far corner of Olympic Park, under the light of a street lamp. Gillian lives in Brisbane and Mary was going there with her on a dawn flight, so the meeting was brief. From there it was home. In the fridge were three beers. Sufficient for a party.
At ten to nine the following morning the RTE crew pulled up outside her house. The arrangement was that they wouldn't knock on the door before nine. They waited until five past. Pat Hickey of the Olympic Council of Ireland beat them to the knock by a minute. Must be a medal in the house.
A new day had dawned and eternity was now her friend.
DENIS WALSH
