In Irish sporting hearts, Sonia O'Sullivan will always occupy a very fond place. Shy and gushing with an irresistible impish smile and a superb athletic frame, she is almost impossible to dislike. And this glossy coffee table book captures that likeability, with atmospheric, cloudy-skied pictures of Sonia training hard on country lanes, or at home relaxing with her child, the photos accompanied by a sensitive but characteristically no-nonsense commentary from sportswriter Tom Humphries.
But there is also a sense of poignancy here. For the other reason we hold Sonia dear is that, like our sporting and historical heroes of old, she perhaps never really lived up to our greatest hopes. At the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, she is The Girl Who Should Have, as opposed to The Girl Of Whom We Now Don't Speak, the swimmer Michelle De Bruin, who did take gold, but has since found some of the gilt coming off her medals. At Atlanta, Sonia was at the peak of her powers and one of the top athletes in the world. But something happened which caused her to self-destruct. Whether it was sponsorship politics, an illness or just pure pressure, and the buckling prospect of a Chinese contender closing on her shoulder, we still don't know and we may never know.
At the recent Sydney Olympics, it was with relief as much as joy that we saw her take silver, although again there was a sense that, with that famous "kick" of hers, greater things might have been possible. It would be unfair to expect this book to go into such matters. It focuses instead on recent life, training, her romantic involvement with trainer Nick Bideau, and the bitter reaction this last provoked from Bideau's former partner, the Australian athlete Cathy Freeman. Atlanta is barely mentioned, and yet in one section, when she speaks at some length about the scourge of drugs in the sport and the sense of unfairness that the cheaters are always "a step ahead", one can't help thinking about certain parallels and the sense that time, and justice, will eventually catch up with the cheaters (In the China of Ma Junren too, perhaps).
Marianne Lippert, the Canadian swimmer beaten at Atlanta by Michelle de Bruin, endearingly claimed recently that even if the allegations about de Bruin were true, she'd still never swop her silver for a gold. Silver was what she won on the day and she has come to love her medal - fans even write letters to her in silver ink. Sonia, too, will come to love her Olympic silver, and all that it means. Nice girls do come first, but they might more often than not come second.
"There's more to being here than the medals," says Sonia about a tournament which restored our faith in such participative spectacles. "There's more to running than the winning, there's just the rhythm of it". A cliche, perhaps - but it was never more true than in Sonia's case, and this book bears that out, with eloquent, evocative pictures of Sonia with her child, her partner and her home, but mostly with the track, and the open road; running, always running. The tournaments were just in between.
Eamon Delaney is a writer and critic