ATHLETICS: World Indoor Championships: Never has an Irish team arrived at a World Indoor Athletics championship so heavily weighed down by sprinters.

The first edition of the event in Indianapolis in 1987 famously featured a team of just four, all pure middle distance men. The favourite for a medal, Eamonn Coghlan, was tripped and fell, and the other three all won something - Marcus O'Sullivan gold over 1,500 metres, with Frank O'Mara and Paul Donovan taking gold and silver over 3,000 metres.

How times have changed, and of the 13 Irish athletes set to compete in Budapest this weekend only two will run further than 400 metres - James Nolan (1,500 metres) and Maria McCambridge (3,000 metres). Adrian O'Dwyer is a whole other exception and at the age of 20 pioneers new ground in the high jump.

Yet this scenario does reflect the new breed of athletic talent in the country. Domestic 400 metres running is particularly competitive and, over 200 metres, Paul Brizzel and Ciara Sheehy continue to edge closer towards being world class.

Sprint medals might be asking a bit much, but the same was said in Birmingham last year before Paul McKee collected bronze over 400 metres. Sadly he misses out on Budapest through injury.

And this place has been good to the Irish. The shining Sportarena lies in the shadow of the Nep stadium where six years ago Sonia O'Sullivan celebrated two European titles, and for others like Mark Carroll, Jim Hogan and Catherina McKiernan it also holds good sporting memories.

Still, the tight schedule of these championships adds greatly to the task of progressing to the final rounds of the sprint events. And it just might be that come Sunday afternoon either Nolan and McCambridge will be providing the final Irish interest.

It's no secret that Nolan has had problems producing his better races at championship level. Sixth place in Birmingham last year was respectable but he's capable of doing better. His first task will be getting out of tomorrow's heats, and after that he knows the rest is up to him.

"If my heat is slow there is simply no way that I'm going to hang around," he says, "and I fully intend to take it up with a full 800 metres to run. That might seem a long way from home to make a move but I think that is my best chance of making it through to the final."

The 27-year-old continues to invest heavily in his career. For the past three months he based himself at a high-altitude training camp in South Africa and Budapest was always an important stop-off on his ultimate destination this season, the Olympics.

"Training in South Africa went very, very well. But just before I left I picked up a virus which set me back a little, and I actually spent a couple of days in hospital and lost a few vital sessions of training when I had planned to do all my sharpening work. The result is that while I feel extremely strong right now I don't think the acceleration is what it should be."

That seemed to be the case when he ran his first indoor 1,500 metres of the season in France last Saturday night and finished towards the end of the field in 3:45.05.

"The race was slow," he said, "no one followed the pacemaker and everyone started to look at each other waiting for someone to follow with intent. No one did and then there was this great turnover during the last 300 metres and I was just not ready for that kind of massive sprinting."

The real big guns of his event have bypassed Budapest, most notably Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco, but the Spanish, French, Portuguese and of course the Kenyans have still sent athletes of real quality and Nolan will have to dig deep for a second day out.

For McCambridge, the presence of defending World Indoor 3,000 metred champion Berhane Adere of Ethiopia is an indication of the quality in her event. Yet the 28-year-old Dublin athlete has clearly come here in the form of her life, having recently run a lifetime best of 8:56.48 - a time second only to Sonia O'Sullivan on the Irish all-time list. And she has no problem admitting what has made the difference.

"Last year was an absolute disaster," she says, referring mostly to a training trip to South Africa. "Basically I just ran myself into the ground while training out there, thinking and believing that by doing so I would come home and run everyone into the ground. At home in Dublin I considered 80 miles a week as very big mileage but in South Africa I did as much as 120 miles a week which was pure suicide.

"I came home and ran so pathetically poor that I was totally puzzled and frustrated and just could not figure out where everything went wrong. But very soon I began to realise that I clearly overdid it in South Africa, believing that the more miles I did in altitude the faster and stronger I would become."

It's difficult not to train so hard in the perfect conditions of South Africa, but soon even the easy runs had become a slog, and McCambridge was forced to review her approach after a particularly hurtful run in the women's mini marathon. Despite losing out on any grant money she found a fresh and enthusiastic approach to the new season.

Partly designed by her husband and fellow distance runner Gary Crossan, the different routine has so far proved that less can equal more: "Basically we changed everything over the winter by cutting the weekly mileage in half and doing things much faster than before. There was no point in running many miles if you could not keep up with your opponents."

And that - keeping up with opponents - is only the start of the Irish challenge this weekend.