Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco is admitting to just a hint of anxiety going into the 1,500 metres final, one of the showpieces of the seventh World Athletics Championships in Seville this evening.

El Guerrouj, the defending champion, lines up with Kenya's Noah Ngeny, among others, in the hope of re-establishing the order of seniority in the ongoing African dynasty of middle distance running.

And the man who once aspired to be an international footballer before Said Aouita's astounding running in the 1980s pushed him in the direction of athletics, for once betrays the merest suggestion of self doubt.

"This is my biggest race of the year, a world championship and anything can happen in a race of such importance," he said. "You work out most of the plans a long time before the race. But you can never be certain, of course, that is going to happen like that on the day."

El Guerrouj has good reason to be wary of expedient presumptions after his monumental mishap in the Olympic 1,500 metres final at Atlanta. There, having earlier pursued Noureddine Morceli around Europe in the preceding months, he spurned his big chance by clipping the Algerian's heel and falling.

That still rates as the deepest disappointment of his career, more so in view of the manner in which Morceli had earlier denied him the chance of earning big money by refusing to race against him.

The Moroccan is nothing if not a quick learner, however, and has been unbeaten over 1,500 metres and a mile since the end of the 1996 track season. A product of that train of success is a sharp reversal of the roles in his brittle relationship with Morceli.

More worrying by far for the defending champion is the growing threat presented by the 20-year-old Kenyan Noah Negeny. It's true that when the pair met in a grudge match in Zurich earlier this month Negeny was almost 15 metres adrift at the finish. Yet, at his best, his claims are obvious.

To describe the final as another opportunity for Africans to indulge their recent supremacy over the rest of the world is to ignore the depth and talent of the Spanish milers.

Given the opportunity of watching many of the world's biggest sporting presentations over the last 20 years, the Spanish public has not exactly beaten a path to the portals of Seville's new Olympic Stadium. The prospect on Sunday, however, of watching Estevez Reyes, Fermin Cacho and Andres Diaz persuaded locals to fill the arena to something like 65 per cent of its capacity.

Now the hope is that the prospect of Spain's biggest 1,500 metres win since Cacho's Olympic triumph at Barcelona in 1992 will entice an even bigger crowd outdoors in the current balmy weather and ensure the essential backdrop to what promises to be a truly great occasion.

The other race capable of setting the pulse racing is the 10,000 metres final and the chance of witnessing the peerless Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie transform this traditional endurance test into an elegant exercise in athleticism.

Even by the extravagant standards of African long distance running, Gebrselassie is something special, a tiny man who manages to generate the strength and the speed to reduce even very good athletes to something of a rabble. With Paul Tegat heading a talented Kenyan team at this distance and Morocco's Ismail Sghyr included, it's patently wrong to dismiss this as a one man show.

Irish interest today will focus on the preliminaries of the men's and women's 200 metres. Gary Ryan and Paul Brizzell are drawn well apart in the men's event, while Ciara Sheehy, a late addition to the squad, runs in the women's 200 metres.

It is a measure of the expanding standards of Irish sprinting that Ireland is dually represented in the 200 metres. And given that Ciaran McDonagh and Peter Coghlan were also available, Ireland might well have entered a team in the 4 x 100 metres relay.

Yet, a glance at the statistics shows that for all the recent improvement there is still a wide gap separating our runners from the world's elite. Brizzell's seasonal best of 20.74 seconds, for example, makes him only the seventh fastest of the eight runners in heat five, Olympic 100 metres champion Maurice Greene leading the field.

The best the talented Sheehy can do is to keep in reasonable contact in her heat with favourites Debbie Ferguson and Svetlana Goncharenko.