The Inside Track

Meanwhile, however, for most of the Spring and Summer, Irish eyes were smiling on America and the World Cup escapade. That was fine by Sonia. In fact, she preferred it that way. Ironically though, by the time the national focus did begin to swivel over to the fortunes of the 24-year-old cheetah from Cobh, her luck had changed and her form was slipping, badly. She was losing races, coming second, third, fourth. When it came, the full glare of public attention from her home country was blinding, intense and often blistering.

“Irish people are critical more than anything else and also very negative in how they see different performances,” Sonia asserts, her gaze lowered in reflection. “They always see the negative side rather than the positive side. Sometimes it’s easier to see the negative side. If something bad happens to me, if I run a bad race, then I automatically have to see the positive side. It doesn’t do me any good to think negatively. When something like that happens, I feel I have to defend myself all the time from what people say and what people assume. I have to keep defending myself. That’s why I’m glad I live in London. If I was at home, it’d be even more difficult.”

Inevitably, Sonia believes, it’s the people who know the least about the sport who make the loudest criticisms.

“A lot of the people in Ireland are television supporters. I do it myself when I’m watching the soccer team. I’m sitting there shouting, ‘I can’t believe you did that’. It’s so easy. You’re sitting there watching television or you’re in a bar. You have to talk about it and you have to put up bets with your friends. Everybody wants to say something funny. It’s usually abusive.”

For Sonia, such criticism hurts, and hurts severely.

“It hurts because you know that there’s reasons why you made mistakes,” she says. “Some of the reasons were just lack of concentration. I don’t think I was fully prepared for every race I ran. I wasn’t thinking how I would prefer to be thinking for every race.

“Things happened so quickly and I didn’t have time to fully prepare myself mentally. All of a sudden, it was half way through the Summer and I don’t think I had thought about the whole Summer because I had been injured earlier in the year. I didn’t even expect to get as far as I did. It was a case of just getting the best possible out of the least amount of time that I had.”

So, when she’s running a major race, is she doing it for Ireland or for Sonia?

“It depends on the situation. In the European Championships, I’m definitely running for Ireland and I realise that everyone at home is watching me. But if I’m going for a World record or a European record or a personal record then I’m running for myself. Then, the pressure on me comes from myself because Ireland as a country doesn’t understand what I personally want.”

Which is what?

“I want to be the best,” she replies.

Sonia O’Sullivan travels to this interview the way she travels almost everywhere these days, on her Raleigh Tracker. She loves cycling because, she says, “walking makes me tired and I haven’t the patience to stand at a bus stop.”

Our original rendezvous point is The Italian Place, a favourite restaurant of hers close to where she lives in Teddington, London. However, a thunder storm, a delayed flight and a taxi scrum at Heathrow mean that I’m twenty minutes late and, in the meantime, Sonia and photographer Leo Regan have decided to shoot their session in a nearby public park. After the snaps are taken, Sonia’s still reluctant to go back inside. She suggests that we talk while sitting on a park bench so we do.

“I love the outdoors,” she explains. “When I was growing up, I never knew that you could just run and that that could be your life. I always wanted to be a PE teacher because I thought that was the nearest a job could be to playing sport and being outside as much as possible. I studied accountancy when I was over in (Villinova) university in America but I don’t think I could’ve done that as a job (laughs). I’d go mad behind a desk. I’d always have been involved in sports in some way.”

Post-mortems are not part of Sonia O’Sullivan’s mental make-up. Right now, she’s keen to get the last few races of this season over with and she’s already thinking about next year. “The main priority would be to run with a different attitude next year,” she avows. “I’d like to remain unbeaten for a full season and feel like I’m invincible for the full season.”

In that context, how important is it for Sonia to exact a little revenge on Boulmerka, the Moroccan Olympic champion who has beaten her on at least two crucial occasions?

“I wouldn’t pick on her individually as someone I have to beat but if she’s on the starting line then, yes, she has to be beaten along with everybody else. But I would never focus on any one person.”

In the cold light of day now, does Sonia believe that Boulmerka’s infamous gesture as she passed her during that race in Oslo was intended as a taunt?

“I don’t think so,” O’Sullivan responds. “She hadn’t been running well all year and she prepared for that race while we were all away running in the European Championships. In a sense, she was kinda forgotten about. She knew that and she knew she could take advantage of the situation. She didn’t have anything to lose by going out there right behind me in the race. She was probably over the moon when she won and I really don’t believe she meant anything bad by what she did. The very next meet, she came over and she was talking to me and was being really nice. I know a lot of people read it as some kind of bad gesture but I think she didn’t realise how people read it.”

Beyond next year, gold at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics is her ultimate aim. With a positive attitude, she believes, her chances of a medal are good. But her horizons don’t even begin to recede there. The desire to be the best, she says, means that the potential challenges are endless.

“Once you have achieved an Olympic medal, you can chance your arm at all sorts of different things, all different records, different events at different championships. Once you have that one medal you can experiment a bit.”

In the meantime though, there’s the old problem of the sow that eats her farrow. Ireland has a curious way of treating its sporting champions. Aside from what Sonia sees as the innate negativity of some of the home “television supporters,” there is also, paradoxically, an unhealthy degree of hero worship around as well as a witless desire among some to go to embarrassing lengths to prove that they are the greatest fans in the whole wide world. Witness, for example, the World Cup squad homecoming fiasco.

Sonia O’Sullivan knows how preposterous all this is. Her aunt recently sent her a cartoon culled from an Irish newspaper. It depicts a meeting of Dublin Corporation honchos the morning after her European Championship victory. An obviously confused and exasperated Chairman is scratching his head and saying, “Where can we bring her, she won!”

Sonia loves that cartoon. For her, it says it all really.

“It’s always easy to do something like that when you win but when you don’t you feel like you have to make excuses or something,” she argues. “If I didn’t win a medal in the European Championships, I wouldn’t want to go home. After the Olympics when I finished fourth, there was this huge welcome home thing and at that stage it was fine because it was the best I had ever done. But if I finished fourth in the European Championships, I wouldn’t want to go home. You feel you have to explain and people try and make excuses for you and there aren’t any excuses.”

Let’s clear this up now then. If she fails to win a medal in Atlanta and some jobsworth of a councillor or TD tries to get his mug in the paper by organising a Welcome Home Sonia party, how will she react?

“I wouldn’t go,” she states emphatically. “I don’t see a reason for celebration when there is no reason for celebration. I’d avoid it. You don’t celebrate if you don’t achieve something. If your expectations and goals are so much higher you can’t be happy with what you didn’t achieve.”

Athletes don’t like to hear this but the big story in their sport now is drug use, and if recent events are anything to go by, it’s a story that’s going to, well, run and run. Sonia O’Sullivan sighs a little when I raise the topic but she is adamant in her assertion that the extent of banned-substance consumption is greatly exaggerated. “I’ve never seen a steroid in my life,” she stresses. “I wouldn’t know one if you showed me one.”

Nevertheless, the controversy over the positive dope-testing of highly-rated British athlete (and Europa Cup champion) Diane Modahl during the Commonwealth Games has refocused attention on the issue. Was O’Sullivan surprised when she heard the news about Modahl?

“I was surprised, I suppose, because I know who she is,” says Sonia. “You hear a lot of rumours and stories but she’s not anybody I would have ever thought would be on drugs. There were no rumours about her at all. It’s a shame that they made such a big deal about it and it was headline news for such a long time when people winning races don’t get that much coverage.”

Isn’t there a grapevine on the athletics circuit that pinpoints who the real users are?

“It’s more the people on the outside who are suspicious and who are pointing fingers rather than the actual athletes,” Sonia insists. “People are trying to make a big deal out of this situation. There was an article in the paper making out that it was a big game and a big joke, you know, pick your athlete who’s on drugs. I wouldn’t even read an article like that. I read the first few lines and said this is ridiculous. Okay, so people have been caught on drugs and obviously the dope tests are not working but it’s not important to me who is and who isn’t on drugs. What’s important is that I go out there and train hard and do whatever it takes to be the best.”

What does she think of the way in which the Modahl affair was handled by the athletics authorities, particularly the European Athletic Association ?

“It probably could’ve been handled a lot more privately. She’s had to hide. She hasn’t been able to come out and say, ‘I’m innocent, leave me alone’. Everybody is against her. The press and the news seem to think it’s a great story. They want it to be true so they’ll get even more mileage out of it.”

Of course, there are drugs and ‘drugs’. Has Sonia ever considered trying something like caterpillar fungus? “No,” she laughs. “I don’t think I’m going to start flicking caterpillars off leaves and figuring out how to eat them.”

In an environment where athletes will do whatever is necessary to improve performances, drugs are only one recourse. There are other, more ‘natural’ methods of acquiring that extra edge. For instance, Sonia gives considerable credence to rumours suggesting that, a few years back, Soviet athletes were becoming routinely pregnant because their performances regularly improved during the first three months of pregnancy. After three months, they had abortions.

“Yeah, I definitely believe that was happening but I don’t know who was involved or anything like that,” she says. “It’s not something I would want to do. There’s no reason I would want to do that. Even if you’re told it’s gonna help you, there’s also a percentage who it won’t help. It really is a bit far fetched and extreme.”

In her heart of hearts, doesn’t she believe that the performances of those Chinese athletes who beat her and clocked up such extraordinary times at last year’s World Championships were somehow narcotically enhanced?

“It’s hard to say because they haven’t really run anything this year,” Sonia asserts. “That was going to really tell, if they ran the same times or even in the same general area. They haven’t done anything. They have Asian Games coming up and it’ll be interesting to see what they do there. Were they just a one year wonder? I dunno. It’s hard to believe what they did but they also gave me the encouragement to go out and run as fast as I did this year.”

Indeed, Sonia already has these spectacular times in her sights. “Maybe three years down the road, I could break their record,” she proclaims. “It’s definitely something to strive towards. I’d have to get half way there first and then think about it again. I’d have to go into the race not thinking of running 8.06 but of running 8.12 or something and refocus again the following year. That’s how I’d do it.”

Of late, Sonia O’Sullivan has become more guarded about her personal life. In her last Hot Press interview, two years ago, she spoke openly about her then boyfriend and their relationship. Today, she becomes instantly tongue-tied when the subject of her current love interest is broached. She has been linked romantically with her trainer/manager, Kim McDonald, but when I bring this up, she responds with only a beetroot blush and a firm, “I’d prefer not to talk about that.”

Another tack then. Who is her idea of a sex symbol, a member of Take That or Linford Christie? “Oh Lord, neither of them,” she guffaws. “I don’t think like that.”

On matters relating to sex, it seems, Sonia is more than a little old fashioned. Much to my surprise, for instance, she has a disturbingly blinkered attitude to the question of divorce. “I’d probably vote against divorce,” she declares. “Why get married if you’re gonna get divorced.”

Before Family Solidarity get too excited at the prospect of a public endorsement, however, it’s worth noting that at least Sonia O’Sullivan doesn’t feel all that strongly about this issue.

“If I was there I would vote but I wouldn’t make a special trip over,” she adds.

What’s her attitude to abortion?

‘If it’s legal then every individual has a choice to make up their own mind. If it’s not legal then you don’t have a choice. Yes, it should be legal but that’s not saying that I think it’s right.”

Is she saying that she doesn’t think that abortion is ever right in any circumstances?

“You can get into that argument in so many different ways because, yes, there are cases when it is right like if it’s gonna save the mother’s life then it’s probably right but, overall, I don’t think it’s right because it’s killing someone.”

Is she religious?

“Somewhat,” she admits. “I believe that God is watching out for me all the time and that He is always there. I kinda hope he’s on my side in all my races. I’d bless myself before all my races. I don’t know if it’s a habit or if it’s a religious thing but I don’t just do it for the sake of doing it. I know what I’m doing.”

And when she loses, does she curse God as zealously as she presumably thanks Him for the victories?

“(Laughs) No, I kinda feel that there’s a reason for it somewhere and that something good is going to come of it down the road. At first, I’m not going to think that. The first thing I say to myself is, ‘Why me again’.”

That’s all? Nothing stronger than ‘Why me, again’?

“Oh, I swear to myself a lot but rarely publicly,” she says, a little too fervently. She’s not one of these language prudes, is she?

“I don’t use that much foul language and when I go home sometimes I’m surprised by how much is used. Not among my family or anything but just in general. Sitting with a friend of mine the other day who I hadn’t talked to in a long time and every second word was the f-word. I was just looking at her thinking, ‘I can’t believe this, why does she need these words in there?’”

For fuck’s sake Sonia, what’s wrong with a little bit of colourful language?

“I don’t like it,” she affirms. “I don’t see how it adds to a person.”

In terms of earning power, Sonia O’Sullivan is undeniably in the big league. However, accountancy graduate or not, money isn’t a major consideration with her.

“I earned a fair bit of money last year and this year but I don’t even know where it is at this stage,” she maintains. “I have a vague idea how much and all that but I’m not worried about it. If I saw a nice house somewhere then maybe I would consider buying it but I haven’t seen that house yet.”

Her hobbies are modest. She likes music (“Deacon Blue’s greatest hits is the current CD I listen to a lot but Enya and Clannad are always big hits”) and reading (“three books at the moment, The Client by John Grisham, a Maeve Binchy novel and Wild Swans which I started last year after the whole Chinese situation”). She also eats out regularly and goes for a few drinks with friends, mostly in the Teddington area, but only rarely does she “go mad.”

“I have to accept that I’m a full time athlete and that I have to say no to certain things and certain people and live a strict life,” she says. “My time is not my own. It’s not that I don’t like it because I enjoy how I live and what I do. It’s just, sometimes, you really do have to be focused all the time and you can’t have any distractions. Sometimes, I think I’d like to go out more often but when I am out I don’t think that. I like to go out in my own way with my own friends. Going out every night is not something I’d like to do.”

Does she ever feel uncomfortable with the corporate side of her work, the functions she has to attend because of her sponsorship contracts with the likes of Heinz or Reebok?

“I wouldn’t say I feel uncomfortable but I don’t enjoy it particularly,” she concedes. “I’m always thinking I have work to do and I have training to do and this is interfering. What I’d like to do more of is things that would help younger athletes. I’d prefer to do something like that than to go and receive an award at some dinner. It’s just so much more beneficial and I’d feel like I’m doing something and helping somebody.”

There was considerable comment about Sonia’s decision to change her hairstyle to a shorter cut prior to the European Championships. Was this for aerodynamic reasons?

“No,” she replies. “It had been very hot all year and I was getting sick and tired of tying my hair up. I just fancied a change. It had nothing to do with athletics.”

Some see it as, to put it mildly, rather odd that an athlete of Sonia O’Sullivan’s stature and financial worth still receives a grant of £20,000 from the Irish Olympic Council to help in her preparation for the Atlanta Games.

“I feel I deserve the support of the Olympic Council because what I’m doing is for their benefit,” she insists. “If something happened, if I fell off my bike and I have to go and get any kind of medical treatment, I need that money. Any money that I win in races or that I get from shoe contracts, that’s my job. This Olympic Council money I can use if I’m injured or sick or if I have to go away training. I shouldn’t have to worry about that. I shouldn’t feel that I have to go and run a race to earn money.”

There is a perception in some quarters that there is a degree of personal coolness between O’Sullivan and Catherina McKiernan. No-one’s saying that they’re Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding, just that the two aren’t as close as one might expect them to be. “We’re not not friends,” replies Sonia to this suggestion. “She lives in Cavan and I live over here. I don’t see her that often. I have never trained with her. She is not really at the same races that I’m ever at. I don’t see her often enough to be that friendly with her. I’m not not nice to her or anything. We’ve eaten together. There’s no degree of unfriendliness between us. We’re both different athletes and probably perceived differently.”

After this season, Sonia O’Sullivan’s immediate plans are to return to America for a couple of months and to relax for a while. Then, it’s back to London for more serious training and intensive preparation for ’95 and, of course, the ’96 Olympics.

Can she ever imagine herself living without the discipline of a high-level athletics career?

“I don’t think I’ll ever not run,” she asserts. “I’ll probably always be involved in athletics in some way. It’s too much a part of my life to ever give up.”

Would she like to have children one day?

“Yes, I love children,” she says. “I’ve baby-sat for some of my friends and I get on really well with kids. It’ll be a couple of years yet though. I’ll have to settle down with some man first. I can’t do that by myself (laughs).”

As she limbers up for her evening run, I ask Sonia O’Sullivan who her idols are. It’s a question about which she ponders for several moments.

“I wouldn’t have any one person in mind but anyone who works hard to achieve what they want,” she avers. “A lot of athletes are easy to admire because you can tell that they’ve put in the work and they get the results. There’s not anybody that I wish I could be like. I’ve met a lot of people who are very famous, athletes who are big idols to some people. I’ve been sitting beside these people and they’re no big deal. They’re just ordinary people, ordinary people like I’m an ordinary person.”

With that, she darts off for a five mile lap of the park before tea time.