Another sunny day in Atlanta. At the small college track on the leafy city outskirts, the morning air burns with effort and before long there is a particularly exhausted body on the track. The summer stadiums of Europe beckon and these are the days which would make the difference, exactly what Susan Smith-Walsh is looking for in the months ahead.

Standing in the middle of it all is Loren Seagrave, the man who's been directing his personal sprint training group throughout the winter hideaway. Among the dozen athletes, there's not one without Olympic ambitions on their mind.

It's moving on three years since the American coach, seen in sprinting circles as the one who knows it all, and the Irish athlete, seen here as the one with the most potential, started on the route to improvement. Initially from a distance, that's advanced to being face to face on a daily basis - and so far it has taken her into the Olympic and world arena. Now the final adjustments are almost complete.

"The big difference in preparing for this season was seeing Loren every day," says Smith-Walsh, the added name coming from her American husband Ryan. "In the past we had limited contact and that had its problems, especially last year when I did some stupid things and got injured. This has been the perfect winter's training and there is going to be nothing hectic about the races in the next few months. Unlike last season, I can concentrate on getting everything right for later in the summer and being a lot more consistent in the way I race."

Despite lowering her national 400 metres hurdles record for the third successive season to 54.31 seconds, she agrees that last summer was a disappointment. Her first real taste of defeat. Hopes of a European Championship medal didn't come close and she ended the season a tired and frustrated athlete.

Like any sport, a few seasons of success and one quickly forgets what it's like to lose. Yet she returned to her adopted home in Athens, Georgia, more determined than ever to progress further.

"After the Europeans I was totally devastated. It was hard and I cried but if you want to continue in this game you have to put things into perspective. I had a great Olympics and a great World Championships and you can't be totally unhappy being ranked ninth in the world. I choked in the Europeans but you have to take the good with the bad and I'll just have to come out and do better the next time. The important thing is that I can lift myself back up and I'm sure nobody else had a problem getting over my loss.

"Looking back, there was probably something wrong because I just couldn't push myself like I normally can. There was a certain amount of pressure as well and how much it affected me I don't know, but I definitely was not myself. I know you can't feel really good every day and that just happened to be the most important day."

At this stage, the new season is yet to move out of first gear. Last month she opened her outdoor campaign down in Brazil in 56.11 seconds, more than two seconds faster than at the same point last year, and has since raced in Japan, across America and around Europe, including four events with the Irish team at the European Cup in Finland two weeks back.

But it has been tiring, and now she's back relaxing with her family in Waterford. Today, she runs in the Cork City Sports attempting to set a new record for the 300 metres hurdles. The major meetings have yet to come, and the World Championships in Seville are later still, tucked away at the end of August.

The confidence, meanwhile, is allowed to settle and grow, and nobody shares it more than Seagrave. They first started their coaching relationship by fax before the Atlanta Olympics and it remained haphazard while he spent time coaching in Australia and Thailand. He's now committed to his sprinting group in Atlanta, and believes that Smith-Walsh's much talked about potential is as yet untapped.

"She just continues to improve every year," he says. "And the way her training is going this year, under the right conditions and with a little bit of luck, a sub-54 seconds is something we're both looking at."

That, however, is the standard these days, with world record holder Kim Batten of the US and Olympic champion Deon Hemmings of Jamaica regularly flirting with the 52-second mark.

"Before the Atlanta Olympics, I probably only saw her for two training sessions and maybe three races," he adds. "At one point she asked me if I ever thought she would run that fast, and I said absolutely not."

It's clear they both have found that ideal coaching balance. "Oh yeah, we've known each other for a while now," admits Smith-Walsh, "and it takes a lot for me to say I'm tired but he knows if I need to feel humiliated or I need to be encouraged."

Seagrave has often told the story of when he first saw her run over the hurdles. "Was that with your lead leg or your trail leg," he asked, slightly confused by the manner of her technique. It was a slow process but now he fully understands what Smith-Walsh is capable of.

"She can definitely push herself. You wouldn't know to look at her but she is very explosive and has that raw athletic potential. Then she's a real stickler for detail in terms of her technique, something she is willing to work on relentlessly. There might not be that blazing 400-metre speed but from the technical standpoint she is getting quite good. We've been working on pure speed and power here and she had the strength background from college to make it work.

"If you look back at the Olympics and worlds, she was running every race like a final. Now she can think more about running the final itself and developing a race plan for that level. With incremental improvement we'd like to think she can run low 53 seconds by the end of next year. You don't know on the day but really to medal in the 400 hurdles you have to run under 53 seconds, which is certainly within the range of possibility in this case."

Seagrave can be trusted on predictions. He's most frequently linked to the 100 metres success of Canada's Donovan Bailey at the Atlanta Games, but his reputation had been building long before that and it's hard to name a top American sprinter who has not benefited at some point from his input.

Most significantly, Seagrave is known for formulating new concepts in speed training. And he'll dismiss any ideas that these may not be clean with an extended explanation: "We teach people to be faster rather than train them. It's based on our speed dynamics programme, and involves a number of factors such as reprogramming the nervous system and repositioning the joints to improve the muscle function. You have to unlearn a lot of habits as well, not just running on your toes all the time."

"Most people learn to be fast by accident," he says, "but we've defined the techniques to make it work for anybody."

It was these prospects that also interested Peter Coghlan, the 24-year-old Dubliner who moved to Atlanta last autumn after finishing his scholarship at Yale University. Within a few months he has already shown the difference, setting a new Irish record of 13.47 seconds for the 110 metres hurdles just a couple of weeks into the season.

"He has made sprinting way more precise than I ever thought it was," says Coghlan. "You discover things that you never knew you had to. All Loren is interested in is speed, and I think he even knows a lot more than he gives away."

Coming from this sort of environment, Smith-Walsh is now a more assured athlete. "I'm more confident now than I've ever been," she says, without trying to sound over-confident. "The group we have here are all coming from different events, and all pushing each other. I know how fortunate I am to have all this available.

"The support I've been getting from the TNT sponsorship and the sporting grants makes it possible and you want to do well for the country when it comes to the major championships. But at the end of the day, this is my thing and I want to make it count for myself. I don't think about the sacrifices or what anybody else might say. I just want to be the best I can.

"This season is still a steppingstone to the Olympics next year but the goal now is always to make the final, and after that you are always in with a chance."

She's worked hard for what she's got and is prepared to work harder to get more. She and Ryan have invested in a new house and, at 27, she's looking forward to a few more years at the top. The event in Budapest last summer was one of the better chances that didn't go her way, but now she's on the up again, and still waiting to prove that anything can happen when you reach a major final.