ITS was self recrimination time again for Sonia O'Sullivan in Turin yesterday after she had finished ninth, two places behind Catherina McKiernan in the World Cross Country championship.

From a position in which she appeared to be in uneasy control of the race, she retreated from the battle for precious metal on the last lap when Derartu Tulu, the former Olympic 10,000 metres champion, surged for her second title in three years.

After running at, or close to, the front of the race throughout, Valerie Vaughan and Una English packed sufficiently well, to give Ireland the bronze medals in the team event behind Ethiopia and Kenya, the first time the country has finished in the top three.

And given that it was only after a rethink - and then by the slimmest margin possible - that BLE decided to enter a team, it was a reassuring development for the long term future of women's athletics.

By the time the medals ceremony took place, an hour after the race had finished, O'Sullivan had regained enough composure to take her place on the presentation podium, but earlier there had been familiar signs of an athlete attempting to identify the reasons for her decline from invincibility.

After running at, or close to, the front of the race for 4,000 of the 6,600 metres, her legs betrayed her on the last of the three full laps and suddenly the wounds of Atlanta were open once more.

Joe Doonan, who coaches Catherina McKiernan, would later describe this as one of the most unforgiving championship events of all and given that O'Sullivan had not run a cross country race since 1992, it was no mean achievement to finish in the top 10.

But track success on the scale she enjoyed for almost four years does not lightly countenance aberrations of pedigree and by her own high standards, this was not a performance which satisfied.

"I'm really happy for the other girls but very disappointed I didn't run well," she said. "I felt really good in the early stages, right up to the point where there was little more than a lap to go. But then, for some strange reason, I did not feel as if I were concentrating enough.

"The hill on the course was never a problem for me. But climbing it for the last time, my mind just turned off and from that point, the finish line couldn't come quickly enough, so that I could get off the course.

"People said I looked comfortable in the first half of the race and I was comfortable. And then, it all started to go wrong. It wasn't a physical thing. It was definitely in my mind.

On her decision to lead the race for long stretches, she said: "I just happened to be there at the front. My plan was to be with the pace for as long as possible. But I should have been there longer."

On this occasion, thankfully, there was no evidence of the physical distress which reduced her to tears in Atlanta. But some of her post race reactions were not dissimilar as she sought to rationalise her late collapse and studiously avoided the media.

Together with her agent, Kim McDonald, she found temporary solitude in a retreat overlooking the nearby River Po and there for fully 20 minutes, was lost in deep conversation as she reflected, no doubt, on how it all went wrong for her in those last tortuous 2,000 metres.

She plans to return to London today and is then likely to go to Philadelphia for a short holiday before applying herself to the formidable challenge of rc assembling the pieces in time for the new outdoor track season.

McKiernan, honest as ever, ran to the limit of her capabilities on the day and at one point, looked likely to confound those who had written her off when she jumped into the lead at the start of the last lap.

The steep incline, which followed, would normally have been food and drink to an athlete who has never shirked the difficult bits of her specialist event. Now, she was struggling to hold a straight line and with the momentum of that brief attack spent, she was out of contention in the closing stages when the brave English girl, Paula Radcliffe, broke the challenge of one Ethiopian, Getenesh Wami, only to be engulfed by another, Derartu Tulu in the charge to the finish line.

"With another three weeks' training, it might have been a different story but I just didn't have enough time to build up my strength after starting back late from injury," said McKiernan.