She's past the line, victorious, carrying the flag, cameras are flashing. She's world champion. And now, seconds before the gun, this same damn thought comes creeping up again. What a distraction, what a mindblower.

Focus. Focus. Five hurdles. Sixty metres.

Lead all the way. Before the race she walked up to the first hurdle, that two foot nine inch obstacle that reached exactly half way on her lean, sinewy body, and she looked towards the finish line. She tried again to block out all that lay beyond it. But how is that done? How do you block out a full stadium and prize money that will change your year?

How can you block out that conversation you had with your coach 10 days ago.

"Derv, I've got something to say to youf I think we're ready to win gold over there.

Whaddya think?"

"Ready? I know we are."

"Right, we're going for no other colour. If anyone asks, you're thrilled to make the top eight but you know you're going for gold. No pressure. No distractions."

How can you ignore that you're hurdling for a world title, one that you truly believe you could, should and can win? She spoke to a friend, an athlete also, the night before she flew to Moscow. She told the friend of these daydreams she was having. How she was thinking of the finish line and what would happen beyond it. "Beyond the line?" her friend asked.

"Forget it. It doesn't exist. All that exists is getting to the line." In Moscow, the starter was squeezing the trigger and beyond the line was still a daydream.

When she touched Irish soil last Monday at 9pm the world was a different place. She stepped from the plane and was ushered right and left towards the gathered media and all she wanted was to see her family. There were hordes of journalists, well wishers, smiling onlookers. Couples off to New York for Paddy's Day were asking for her autograph. She left Dublin as Derval O'Rourke from Douglas, Cork and returned as the great hope, the most electrifying talent to emerge in Irish athletics. 7.84 seconds? It can change everything.

The following day she's driving through Sandyford in her car, the '99 Ford Fiesta she bought when she learned to drive last October, and she stops to allow a truck merge into traffic. She glances in her mirror to see a big beastly Mercedes cutting through the road on her right hand side, heading her way. She reckons she must have cut this car off, angered the driver somehow. The Merc pulls up beside her, the passenger window is rolled down.

She's waiting for the abuse to begin. The driver shouts over: "Hey, O'RourkefFancy a race?" Aha, he recognises her, The Queen of Moscow.

She laughs and lowers her window: "No problem, pal, I'll race you any time."

March has been good to Derval O'Rourke but January was another story. She was stationed in southern Portugal at a training camp she attends every year and it felt like she was trapped in limbo. Late last year she sat down with her coach Jim Kilty and examined the tapes of her season's races. They wondered why her natural speed wasn't being translated on the clock and soon the answer was obvious, it flashed like a bulb.

She was stalling over the hurdles, lingering a fraction too long in the air. Between hurdles she was burning the track so fine-tuning the art of the jump became the key to success.

For a fresh pair of eyes they recruited the Olympic hurdler Sean Cahill, a former pupil of Kilty, and together the trio tried to iron out the problem. She needed to raise her hips in the take-off, speed up her trail leg in the jump and push off the ground with more power. She needed to take each hurdle as though it were just another stride . . . physically impossible, but technically attainable.

Kilty and Cahill broke down her jumping technique and devised a new and enhanced formula. She worked on this day after day in Portugal. It was like a golfer dismantling his swing and starting over. It was like a footballer being taught to kick a ball with a locked knee.

"At the end of the two weeks I cried, " she says. "I thought it was a huge disaster. We had done so much work and I felt I wasn't getting anywhere. The season was starting in a few weeks, I was getting slower. The new strategy wasn't working and at this stage I'd changed so much I couldn't go back to the old one."

With Kilty she returned from Portugal and displayed the fruits of their work to Cahill who had stayed behind in Ireland. He was impressed. He said not to worry, improvement was around the corner, but she worried anyway. They focused on the first race of the season in Budapest and hoped this would reveal some promising results.

Two hours before the flight to Hungary, though, she realised her passport was missing and this year's debut was put on hold. "I was thinking 'how bad are things going to get'.

But I got a new passport and the day after I was on a plane to Bratislava for the next race.

My personal best was 8.02 and if I ran inside 8.15 in Bratislava I would have been happy. But I ran 8.02. On the nose. And I don't normally start a season well. It usually takes me a while to realise I'm racing, to get into it. But 8.02. I was happy with that, my confidence was coming back."

She followed Bratislava with victory over strong opposition in Vienna and last month she scooped out a courageous win in Sheffield and broke the eight-second barrier for the first time in her career. A week later she set another Irish record with a time of 7.90 in Belfast.

She says . . . and her coach agrees . . . that smashing eight seconds wasn't as momentous as it sounds. The time would have been achieved last year but for an ankle injury that led to a stretch on crutches. She clipped a hurdle, landed poorly and finished the race. She crossed the line in agony and her season was impeded.

The injury happened in the wrong place, at the wrong time, much like Athens. Three weeks before the last Olympics she was floored with a double blow: food poisoning and appendicitis. She lost 5kgs, almost one tenth of her body weight and still decided she had to travel to Greece. She believed she could pull something out of the bag, but, like taking a hurdle in your stride, it was a physical impossibility. Slowly and without fuss she has been improving and perhaps this is why Derval O'Rourke has been the silent secret of Irish sport.

For Jim Kilty, the joy of last weekend lies in the homegrown nature of O'Rourke's victory.

"It's the first world gold medal we have produced 100 per cent in Ireland, " he says. "Derval is based in Ireland, she has an Irish coach.

There's been no American influence. That's a big, big thing."

The wise head of Kilty and the unbridled enthusiasm of O'Rourke first mingled at a squad session in Limerick when the hurdler was but a young teenager, eager for athletics.

She came to hurdling in the usual way: it simply seemed more interesting than running on the flat. It was there, available and coached at her club, Leevale AC.

"If I had been at a different club where the hurdles weren't taken out I'd never have become involved in the sport. All success comes from that initial exposure. It's a matter of developing the interest from there. I remember first meeting Jim and being amazed by his title, you know, 'National Director of Coaching'. That day Jim arranged for TJ Kearns [the Irish hurdler] to take us for a coaching session. I was overawed. I was being coached by an Olympic athlete. And then there was Susan Smith. She was the big hero."

She's told that on Monday last, Eamonn Coghlan was at the track, coaching kids and hers was the name dangling from the lips of the youngsters. She smiles and says, "Really? Wow. That's so nice."

She didn't know it at the time but in taking on the hurdles, she secured for herself an exciting life. The 60m hurdles is the kamikaze event of the athletics circuit. Hurdlers can fall like bowling pins. Half an inch too low on one take-off can ruin months of work. To simply graze a hurdle is the difference between first and failure.

Hurdling is unique and pulsating and dominating the event year after year is difficult and almost unattainable. And yet, that is the goal. When she began this season's training in October she took her mobile phone and altered the welcome note on it. For five months it read 'European Medallist' and when she arrived back from Moscow she didn't alter it.

"The European Championships in August are the next target. It's outdoors, over 100 metres and five extra hurdles so there's double the chance of something going wrong. I spoke to Jim on Tuesday and we reckoned I'd need a time of 12.5 seconds in Gothenburg.

That's a phenomenal time really, but you know, this time six months ago I would have said 7.84 was a phenomenal time too. And the thing is, once I get over that fifth hurdle I feel stronger and over a longer distance I feel I can go faster and faster. I suppose I've settled into this new technique."

The title of world champ sits easily with her.

She likes it. These last few days, amidst all the bells and whistles of success, she finds herself thinking of that gold medal resting on the kitchen table of her apartment in Glasnevin with the newspapers of the week scattered beneath it.

"Yeah, it's great, " she says. "It's a new world for me. Things have changed but the basics, like coaching, nutrition, will always remain the same. External stuff will change though. Like, it's unbelievable not to have to worry about paying rent. As an athlete this is what you worry about.

"People think it's glamorous but you're wondering 'will I get a grant next year, if I get injured will I be able to pay the rent, will I have money to eat'. So things like that will have changed and that's fantastic."

Beyond the line in Moscow and finally those cameras are flashing. A fraction of a second, 0.03 to be exact, separates first from third and eyes are on the results board. But O'Rourke knows she has won. Still, she refuses to celebrate until all is confirmed. "The typical Irish attitude, " she says.

In the media zone, the world press are amazed with her reaction. She's so calm and they expected hysterics. They thought gold would roll her over, bring her to her knees, as though success were a bullet that would strike her from behind.

But she was ready on the blocks. She had been ready for days.

IRELAND'S GOLDEN BOYS ON THE GOLDEN GIRL

It was appropriate that Ireland's two other gold medallists at the World Indoor Athletic Championships were together, "shing the White River in northern Arkansas, when word of Derval O'Rourke's triumph arrived.

"1987 was huge for me and a little like Derval, my win was unexpected, " said Marcus O'Sullivan, now head Track and Field Coach at Villanova University. "My own gold gave me con"dence to go on to bigger and better things and I'm sure it will be a big springboard for Derval."

Frank O'Mara, 3,000m winner in 1987 and 1991, said international success propels an athlete into a position of leadership. "Attention is de"ected towards you when you achieve something like this. I found that to be the greatest change after the World Championships of 1987.

Eamonn Coghlan had the burden of expectation for a long time but after Indianapolis, that shifted to Marcus and myself. We had to be more than just competitive so following up on success becomes important."

When Coghlan "rst set the world record for the indoor mile in 1979 Kenny Moore of Sports Illustrated said his life was about to change.

"He was right, " recalls Coghlan. "The same thing will happen for Derval but in a more stunning way. When you break a world record or win a world championship it puts you on a totally different plateau and you carry certain expectations. Derval will have a different kind of pressure from here on but having observed her over the years as a commentator, I know she's going to thrive on that."

Ronnie Delany says O'Rourke is continuing a signi"cant hurdling legacy. "Ireland may not have a big sprinting tradition but we've had some great hurdlers; Bob Tisdall from 1932 and Eamon Kinsella from my own time right through to Derval O'Rourke. She has given Irish athletics a great sense of joy."