HER head is into the wind on George's Quay and below the ankle length coat runners sit on her feet like comic book tug boats. Her friends in work laugh. All the time her runners sit under the desk in her office A comfort and reminder of what she is as much as a practicality.

Susan Smith elevates her nose out from under her collar and mutters her thanks that today she has at least the protection of the city streets. Santry Stadium in a February gale is a lonely place for athletes. Today she is thankful that her schedule has her pushing weights instead of facing into the final straight and a ferocious North wind. On such days it is difficult to fathom the benefits of winter training in Ireland.

Her tan has faded since the last time the microphones and cameras came to hunt her out of the athlete's village in the Georgia Tech, Atlanta. Smith then had been killing time before her 400 metre hurdles event, learning how to shrink the days and expand her mind beyond the ticking clock and the breakfast dinner training lunch routines that counted down the hours and minutes to her event.

Looking back now Atlanta is a comforting memory, the highest point in a string of Irish records that had started with a 56.49 run in South Africa early in the year and ended in an Olympic semi final run in 54.93 - over seven metres faster than any Irish woman had ever run before. It was her sixth Irish record in an eight month period.

But more importantly was the manner in which Smith left the Olympic stadium, not in an heroic last gasp heap, but still rising and generating the sort of confidence that left people thinking that here was an athlete in which We could have faith.

"I found my experience in Atlanta very encouraging," she says. Dion Jennings (Olympic champion) came up to me in Sheffield last August and said she'd watched me run and that I was at the stage she had been at four years earlier. She said to me, `you'll be up in the medals next time.'"

Kim Batten (silver medallist) didn't even make it to the Olympics last time. Tonya Buford Bailey (bronze medallist) only made it to the semi final in Barcelona. She didn't make the final. That sort of thing gives me hope.

"I was saying to Buford before the games that I really wanted to make it to the semi finals. She said, `Why? You have to think about making it to the final.'"

When I said I'd run a good race in North Carolina, she said, `I know.' She knew my times too. I never thought that those girls would be looking at me and saying watch out for her - but they are - and they will.

"I spoke to them all after the final, Debbie Ann Harrie, Rosey Edeh - they all told me I could get further, which means beating them. `That's fine'."

FINE for Smith means having gone into a booking office in Atlanta, where she was based in 1995, and buying tickets for what was to be the biggest show on earth the following summer. Back then she didn't want to watch from the outside as the world's top athletes passed by her adopted city. She had moved to Atlanta to be close to her coach Loren Seagrave, working in a branch of accountancy firm Coopers and Lybrand, a company with whom she is still employed.

But at that stage the Waterford girl was on crutches, dragging herself around sweltering Atlanta wondering when she was going to be fit enough to even run again. A broken bone in her foot, the navicula, had finally been screwed into place after a series of set backs. The bone finally mended and the programmes arranged by Seagrave began to show improvement as Smith spent the summer bettering Irish records with impetuous regularity. Still, she was practically unknown before she stepped onto the track in Atlanta.

For the health of her mind, though, the seemingly unimportant intimations from some of the best runners in the world continue to spark Smith's imagination. The soft words of Hemmings, Batten and Buford Baily can take the hard edge of a south east wind. If only for that they are a spur.

Sometimes it takes two hours, sometimes five, to complete a daily session and then there is work to do. Smith's needs are varied but such encouragement can take an athlete some distance through a merciless Irish winter. And this one has been such.

The mould left over from last year's campaign looked good enough to be used again and Smith, through British agent Andy Norman and BLE, scheduled in a month's trip to South Africa in January. It had worked well at the beginning of the 1996 season and Smith felt that a similar plan would allow her build a solid platform for the year ahead. She had then planned to come back to Ireland, briefly, before flying to Pretoria for a second African stint before beginning to race.

"On one of my first few days training I pulled a hamstring. Then I got a terrible vius. I was really, really sick. I thought I had something like Ebola. I couldn't eat or drink. I just lay in bed all day long. I thought I was dying. I had flu symptoms but far worse. The trip was a complete right off and I didn't get anything out of South Africa. I just ended up coming home.

Smith is only now recovering but next week plan `B' for the World Championships comes into effect and again she will team up with Seagrave face to face.

Such is his reputation that even when Smith is in Ireland, his prints are all over her lifestyle and schedules. He faxes her a monthly programme. She faxes him $200. It's a transaction that has been kind to her.

"It works. He faxes me the workouts. I do them. I send him the odd cheque and that's how it works. It is costly but he's worth the money. I need his programmes, I really need them. I never worked with him until before the Olympics and look what I did. I know there's a lot more there. I had never run close to those times before until I started to train more with him.

"I learned more about my body and I learned more about my race. I learned to cope with a lot more pain, learned that my body could actually do it. Before I didn't know that my body was capable of doing such things - just pushing to the limit in training."

There were other practical problems that Smith had to iron out before moving on. Having come from the 100 metre hurdles her technique was generally good but her stride pattern, a principle element of the whole routine, was practically useless. Smith did not have the confidence to take 15 strides between each of the 10 two foot, six inch jumps, preferring a less demanding 17. Seagrave did not discuss it with her. He simply said, "you have to do 15."

It wasn't a matter of ability. It was a matter of power.

"As I got much stronger, I was able to do it. It just came with the territory," she says.

Despite this year's setback in Africa, Smith has perceptibly changed her attitude. She is now unafraid, more confident of her aims and more assured as how to go about achieving them. It's not the brash "can do" attitude of an athlete trying to talk herself up, but revelatory. Atlanta opened her eyes.

Last summer in the athletes' village she was approached by an Irish journalist who requested an interview. He asked her whether she was taking part in the opening ceremony, to which she enthusiastically answered yes. The journalist then suggested that she was happy to be at the Olympics just to take part in the festivities, to enjoy the Olympic experience. The question and the insinuation that Smith might have lowered her sights to that of a journeyman runner was said to have greatly upset her. The interview was effectively abandoned.

Her strength now, she says, is her will. "It's my strongest quality. I think I'm a confident person and I think my running gives me confidence. I'm confident enough to say that I'll take another Irish record this summer. I'm aiming for the World Championships final. Whatever time that means, that's what I have to do. If I have to run 52 seconds, so be it."

Fifty two seconds would have won the gold medal at the previous three games in which the event has been run, at Los Angeles in 1984, Seoul in 1988 and Barcelona in 1992. Anything under 53 seconds would have won silver in Atlanta. Smith's current Irish record of 54.93 would have earned her the silver medal at Los Angeles and earned her eighth place in the Seoul final.

The Jamaican gold medallist in Atlanta, Hemmings, ran 55.58 in Barcelona and finished in seventh place. In the four intervening years, Hemmings was able to pare 2.76 seconds off her time to run 52.82 in last August's final.

While the times needed for medals in 2000 are unlikely to stay static, Smith sees no reason why she cannot show a similar improvement to Hemmings. But Britain's Sally Gunnell's winning time of 53.23 in Barcelona would not have placed her in the medals in Atlanta. Smith is realistically, therefore, looking at a target of under 52 seconds in an event, that because of its recent Olympic inclusion, is probably evolving more quickly than most.

"For me to be the best in the world - and that's my plan because I want to win the Olympics in Sydney and I want a European medal next year and I want to make the World Championships finals in Athens - I need to be a full time athlete, no question. I now need the funding wherever it comes from. I don't like begging for money because I find it demeaning, but I do badly need sponsorship."

PERHAPS the new order established this week by Bernard Allen TD and former marathon silver medallist John Treacy, will see to it that Smith does not have to again plead the poor mouth. Her marriage to American Ryan Walsh in Waterford after the World Championships is unlikely to alleviate any financial concerns and although her company has been laudably generous, Smith is unsure as to how to go about applying for government funds.

Is it through the Olympic Council of Ireland or through the Irish Sports Council, as we were told this week. Whichever body it is, athletes are now planning for the World Championships and ultimately the Sydney Olympics.

The speed at which funding is processed is critically important. In the four year period between Barcelona and Atlanta, Smith received no more than £2,500. Gary Ryan, who reached the second round of the 200 metres and who along with Smith was arguably another one of our most successful competitors, received just £500.

At this point, Smith is arguably our best medal hope going into the next Olympic cycle. While plotting times and using slide rule projections to predict what will happen in four years may be as useful as spreading sheep's entrails, her confidence has generated valuable momentum.

She will ignore the indoor season and the World Championships in Paris preferring instead to stay in the US until May. She has her plan. She will follow it rigidly.

She takes off into the wind, the two tugboats puffing away in the direction of Grafton Street, the collar pulled up. Not a head turns to notice her. Not yet. It doesn't bother the 23 year old. She doesn't even notice.