... if I slowed down I'd lose so I ran into a wall and cut both knees open but it was ok I had won. Derval O'Rourke, aka 'the new Sonia', tells Mary Hannigan about the demands of training, celebrity and living a drug-free life.
You ask if she was competitive at a young age and she hides her face and giggles. Well? "When I was about 10 there was a boy on my estate who wanted to race me because he heard 'Derval O'Rourke in number 39 is fast'. I think I had this funny notion that we'd get married - I felt that him wanting to take me on was a romantic thing." Was it? "No."
"We raced from one end of the green, in front of my house, to the other. I remember about 10m from the end I had to make a decision: if I kept running to the line I'd have to run into a wall, covered in pebbles, there wouldn't be enough time to slow up. But I was thinking 'If I slow down he'll just pass me at the end.' So I ran into the wall."
You didn't? "I did. Like an eejit. I cut both my knees open. There was blood draining from them when I was carried home. But it was okay, I'd won. My Dad saw it out the window. 'She's fast,' he said, 'but she's definitely not smart.' "
Fourteen years later, O'Rourke again declined the option of slowing down towards the end of a race when she knew her full speed would send her crashing into a wall. Fortunately this wall was padded, positioned at the end of the straight in the Moscow stadium where she ran in the 60m hurdles final at the World Indoor Championships in March.
It was only after hitting the wall and turning around did she realise she'd held off her challengers in the tightest of finishes to become the first Irish woman to win world indoor gold. Five hurdles and 7.84 seconds after bursting from the blocks and Derval O'Rourke's life had changed.
Or had it? "In some ways yes, in others no," says the 25-year-old from Douglas, Co Cork. "Day-to-day things haven't changed at all, but it was crazy for a few weeks until I got an agent and a different phone number. I get recognised a little bit now as well. And I think because I'm quite natural when I do interviews people think they know me." She laughs when she recalls the encounters she has had, like the one at Amsterdam airport.
"This man just walks up to me says 'Did you have a race?' I said, 'Yeah, Lausanne last night.' He said 'How'd it go?' I said 'I ran a personal best but I want to run quicker.' He said, 'Keep it going, you're going in the right direction, good girl,' and he was gone. The person with me said 'Who's that?' And I said 'I have no idea.' It's hilarious, but really nice."
But, naturally enough, this new celebrity comes with higher expectations and the accompanying pressure. O'Rourke had hardly crossed the line in Moscow when there was talk of a medal at this summer's European Championships in Gothenburg (August 7th- 13th) and even the Olympic Games in Beijing in two years.
She's fiercely ambitious and believes if all goes right she has it in her to meet those expectations, but bitter experience at the Athens Olympics taught her that neither she, nor anyone else, should judge her on "one day in her life".
"This is a short career and I'm starting to really get what I want out of it, starting to be as good as I always believed I could be. But I learnt from Athens that you can't control what happens. You can't put your whole life into the Olympics. The Olympic Games is one day in your life. Yes, I want to win an Olympic medal and I think I'm capable of winning one, but if I don't I'm not going to curl up and die."
Athens, as it was for most of her team-mates, proved to be a huge personal disappointment for O'Rourke, who failed to advance beyond the opening heat of the 100m hurdles. "I didn't run in the Sydney Olympics because I was only 18 but loads of my friends went and they got slated back home. I thought it was awful but I never felt it as bad as when I ran the Olympics and read some stuff about myself.
"It was hard to read it, really hard. I think the one that got to me the most was when one of the papers added up the amount of funding I had received over six years, but they just wrote the overall figure so it looked like I had been paid this mad lump sum in one year and I was just having a laugh. I was on €1,200 for three years, then €4,600 for a year and then €11,500 - minimum wage. I just wanted to go around to people to explain. It was horrible.
"I had been ill before the Olympics. I'd been in hospital two weeks before, but people didn't see me there, with drips coming out of me and doctors saying you shouldn't run the Olympics. People don't see that. My parents were so proud of me, but I was so disappointed. It was something I'd dreamt about since I was a child, then you go there and things go wrong, it's just not the same. I was so emotional.
"I came home, had a couple of months off, and then it's another four-year build-up to the next Olympic Games. You start all over again. I was so stressed out about the whole thing, but I will never get like that again. Never.
"But I decided the night I ran at the Olympics that I would give it four more years to try and make it. If by 2008 I hadn't won a medal at a major championship, game over, walk away. When I got back I just sat down and thought about what I needed to run faster: I needed a nutritionist, a sports psychologist, I needed help with my technique, and I needed a good physio all the time.
"So I thought, who in the country has done well? Sonia . So I e-mailed her, having never really talked to her before. She was, and is, an absolute legend to me. I laugh when people call me 'the new Sonia'. If I finish my career having done half what she did it would be so fulfilling. She was so extraordinary. She broke world records, was ranked number one in the world. I think I can win medals, I think I can win worlds, but the consistency of her performances was just phenomenal. To be honest, it does her a disservice to call me the new Sonia. She's just so impressive, I'm nowhere near what she's done yet.
"Anyway, my e-mail was so long, just blabbing on - 'I'm so sad, I just want to be good' - I'm sure she was reading it thinking 'Oh God, this child is falling apart,' " she laughs. "But she e-mailed me back the longest e-mail, she gave me all the names I needed, told me everything she did, the people she used, all this advice, so I started putting things in place. This is the first year the hard work has shown. Slowly, steadily I'm getting to where I always knew in my heart I could be."
And "slowly, steadily" is the key. For casual observers of Irish sport O'Rourke came from nowhere in Moscow, but those who knew their athletics were aware of the work she was putting in with her coach Jim Kilty and hurdles coach Sean Cahill. Her goals were coming into sight.
It has been built on hard work, and no more. "I'm obviously not on drugs," she says. "I can pull it out at championships but the work you have to put in to do that is phenomenal. I can't win Golden Leagues every week for three months on the circuit. I can't do it because I'm not on drugs; my body would just get injured even trying. I never do it for money. If you're on drugs you earn more money because you're going to win on the circuit a bit more, whereas hopefully I'll win at championships where there isn't as much money. But to win championship medals is so much more important to me than winning Golden Leagues or big meets all the time. I can do that without drugs."
Does she worry, though, about what she's up against? "I think it was more of an issue when I was younger because I was so far away from where I am now . . . But I've proved to myself now that I can be the best in the world indoors on my day without drugs. I can do it one or two days a year, but I just have to get it right.
"People cheat in every walk of life. I know people who got firsts in college having done some dodgy stuff. You just accept it. Maybe I'd feel differently if I came fourth in the worlds and I knew the three ahead of me were on drugs. That will probably happen me some day. I'll have an inkling, and it will probably hurt. If I ever woke up in the morning and thought 'Without drugs I'm never going to win a medal again', I'd walk away.
"But you can't control it. Anywhere there's money people are going to cheat. Money and fame, that's what it's about. I remember reading a survey a few years ago of American sportspeople. The question was: if you could be an Olympic champion, with all the money and fame, but you'd die at 35, would you take it? Eighty per cent of them said they would. When you think of that mindset, it's crazy, frightening.
"But if you're American - or, say, not Irish - you have a lot less to lose if you test positive. If you test positive in Ireland . . . well, people invest their hopes and dreams in you. They don't really care anywhere else. We don't have that many people who are doing really well on the world stage, so you are letting people down personally. So it's a lot bigger to do that here.
"I was in UCD when Michelle Smith was there doing law, and people were still talking about her. I just said 'It's six years on. Let it go. Let the girl live her life now. She didn't murder anyone.' I just felt very bad for her. She never tested positive . . . People have different opinions on it."
O'Rourke began racing when she was seven. "It was a case of 'no one can beat me' - so then I would be in shock if somebody did. When I was 13 I went to the British under-15 championships. I had never been beaten in a hurdles race and I came fourth. I went up to my Dad in the stand and I said 'Daddy, I don't understand,' and he said 'You will get beaten sometimes.' I did gymnastics and hockey as well. I was a centre forward and I never passed the ball. My Dad used to say 'You have to pass the ball,' and I'd say 'But Dad, I don't trust them.'
"That's why I do an individual sport. The real thrill was winning races at Cork City Sports in Páirc Uí Chaoimh because you got to walk up the steps like the GAA players and say your name into the microphone - that was my target, I wanted to talk in to the microphone. I'd say the same thing every year, 'Derval O'Rourke, my mum's over there,' and I'd wave at her. Everyone used to say to me, 'Would you not say something different?'
"When I was 13 I decided I wanted to run in the Olympics. I started believing I could do it when I was 18, 19; it was then I started taking it seriously, when I got to college."
And since then every other part of her life has had to be squeezed in around her running. "Yeah, in lots of ways I'll have plenty to catch up on when I finish. Most of my friends are in good jobs at this stage, and have bought houses. Frightening! I do think about what I'll do after this. Every week I look up the appointments and I look for jobs I could do - I don't find very many. My degree was in geography and sociology but I don't particularly want to work in either area. I don't think they'd suit my personality. My postgrad was in business, but I don't think I'm tough enough for business. I can't see myself nine to five, at a desk, looking at figures. I don't know. We'll see."
For now she works part-time at the DCU sports club, but the financial pressures have been eased considerably by a sponsorship deal with Spar, which, combined with her funding from the Irish Sports Council, should guarantee that she won't have to worry about money as she builds towards Beijing.
Her parents, Terry and Eva, her sister Clodagh and boyfriend Kris Stewart, who is also an athlete, are probably just astounded that she has made it this far - in one piece.
"We were playing this game in a neighbour's house when I was a kid: we challenged each other over who'd go to the highest step on the stairs and jump down. So I decided to blow the whole thing out of the water and go to the top. The other kids were going 'nooooooo', and I said 'oh yes, just watch me.' So I cockily walked up the stairs, in my matching Benetton tracksuit. I knew I had to jump far to miss the bottom step, so I jumped really high - and hit my head off the ceiling. Split it open. Hit an electricity box. Landed. Rolled forward and smacked my forehead. Had to be taken to hospital. My mother fainted in the hospital and had to be taken to a different cubicle. So, yes, I was quite competitive as a child. But, as my Dad said, not smart about it."
She hopes Gothenburg will prove less perilous, although her build-up to the European Championships has been blighted by injury. "I think everyone is so uncomfortable with the fact that I hurt my pubic bone, people go: 'She's got a groin injury.' I wasn't doing anything perverted, I was running at the time! But it's absolutely perfect now. If I medal in Gothenburg, which I hope I will, it will probably mean a little bit more because things have been harder. When you have a crap time, when things go wrong, you learn a lot more. This year I've learnt more from getting injured and dealing with it than I did from winning the medal. Everything's easy when you win a medal, everyone wants to talk to you, everyone wants to help you, but when you get injured it's hard."
She mightn't be in number 39 any more, but Derval O'Rourke is still fast. Only now she's being rewarded with medals instead of cut knees.