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During 1994, Sonia O'Sullivan totally dominated the international
distance running scene. She set the fastest time of the year in four
events, the 1500m, 1 mile, 2000m and 3000m, and the second fastest time
in the 5000m. On 8 July, at Edinburgh, she broke the 2000m world
record, setting a new time of 5min 25.36sec. The next week, in London,
she broke the European record for the 3000m, beating Britain's Yvonne
Murray, and setting the year's fastest time of 8min 21.64sec. This
moved her to fifth on the all-time world list, behind the four Chinese
runners who had all set their personal bests at the 1993 National
Championships in Beijing. Only three days later, at Nice, O'Sullivan
recorded the year's fastest 1500m, a personal best, of 3min 59.10sec,
and only four days after that, she won the mile at the Bislett Games in
Oslo, in a time of 4min 17.25sec.
This was the season's best, and it
moved O'Sullivan to fourth on the all-time world list. All four of
these times were also new Irish records, and after this two week period
of record breaking, O'Sullivan became a clear favourite to win any event
she chose to compete in at the European Championships in Helsinki in
August. At Helsinki, O'Sullivan elected to only contest the 3000m, with
her main opposition expected to come from Yvonne Murray. In the final,
on 10 August, Murray set the pace with O'Sullivan on her shoulder.
With 200m to go, O'Sullivan surged past Murray to win easily (see photo above)
in 8min 31.84sec. O'Sullivan followed this with a win over 5000m in
the Grand Prix final in Paris on 3 September. At the end of a long
season, on 9 September, the understandably tired O'Sullivan finished
only fifth in the 1500m at the World Cup in London. (Ron Casey)
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