Ireland's hopes of getting among the medals for a second consecutive year in the World Cross-Country Championships, were enhanced yesterday in a dispatch from Sonia O'Sullivan. O'Sullivan, currently in Australia, has indicated that she intends to return in time to run in the championship, for only the third time, in Morocco on March 22nd.

With lingering hopes that Catherina McKiernan will also make herself available for one of the showpieces of the athletics year, Irish prospects of again finishing in the top three are thus, suddenly renewed.

To ensure that she is fully competitive for the occasion, O'Sullivan has embarked on a course of altitude training in Falls Creek in Victoria State, the first time in her career that she has deemed it prudent to follow in the footprints of other track celebrities.

There, in company with the Australian cross-country squad, she aims to get fully competitive for the track segment of her Australian programme before turning her attention to the big event in Morocco.

After some outstanding runs over the country in the formative years of her career, O'Sullivan abandoned this facet of the sport almost totally, to concentrate on her development as one of the most accomplished track athletes in the world.

The exception was at Boston in 1992 when, with little or no cross-country practice, she finished eighth in the World Championship in which McKiernan was beaten in controversial circumstances for the gold medal, by the American, Lynn Jennings.

Her return to cross-country competition coincided with the introduction of prize money at Turin last year but after leading the race at one point, she fell down the field to finish ninth. Now, she aims to profit from that experience and ensure a greater presence in the closing stages of the race in Morocco.

The decision to embark on altitude training for the first time is indicative of her determination to fight her way back to the top of the world rankings after another disappointing year in 1997.

It is almost 18 months since her career was derailed in Atlanta and rehabilitation has proved more difficult than even the most pessimistic forecasts of the time. Now, by taking herself into training in the highly rarefied air of Falls Creek, she hopes to recover the edge which made her a dominant force in international athletics for some four years.

Apart from a road race in Honolulu in which she finished eighth earlier this month, O'Sullivan has not run competitively since abandoning the Grand Prix circuit in some disillusionment in August. Providing there is no late deviation from her programme, however, she will now have two track races over 5000 metres at Sydney and Melbourne before returning to Europe at the end of February.

With O'Sullivan committed to running in Morocco, attention will now turn to McKiernan. Unlike O'Sullivan, she has never reaped the rewards her talent deserved on the track but in cross-country competition, she was frequently in a different class to any other Irish woman.

For all her enormous commitment, however, she has never won the World Championship. Even a sequence of second placings has been no compensation for the Cavan athlete who it seems, is fated to be always the bridesmaid in this particular event.

Her bad luck was compounded by injuries in the last couple of years and in spite of winning the IAAF Cross-Country challenge on no fewer than four occasions, it was no real surprise when she announced some time ago that she intended to specialise in road running.

To date, that switch has proved spectacularly successful and with seven wins on the road to her credit, her rating has inflated to the point where she was invited to sign a lucrative deal to run in the London marathon for the next two years. The first of these is scheduled for April 26th and therein lies the rub for the Irish selectors.

This is only five weeks after the cross-country championship in Morocco and as yet, McKiernan is still uncertain if it is feasible to run in both races. On her final decision, may well depend Ireland's prospects of getting among the title contenders in north Africa.

In the meantime, McKiernan is planning to run her first cross-country race of the season in Durham on Saturday when the field for the women's race is expected to include several Kenyan athletes.