Waitz: Has Sonia still the hunger for Olympics?
The Norwegian is a friend of the Irish star from their days training in Waitz's adopted town of Gainesville, Florida, and believes O'Sullivan, 34, can have a great Olympic Games in Athens later this year if she stays fit and healthy.
But Waitz sees parallels in O'Sullivan with her own lengthy and successful career and thinks she has reached the stage in her career where winning becomes less important.
"She's going through different phases in her life and I'm pretty sure that now, having two children makes a big difference," Waitz said. "Your priorities kind of change a little bit and I'm sure that running is a passion for her and she likes it and wants to be the best. But thinking back at how I felt at the same period in my running career, I don't think she is as hungry as she was 10 years ago.
"And that happens automatically when you have been in the sport for years and years and you have won championships and set records, especially now with the family and everything; you still want to do it but there are different priorities.
"There's also the fact that she's getting older. I'm not saying she's old, she's in her early thirties and that is not an old age. But she has been running for years and that is also what happened to me. I retired when I was 38 and people said to me 'Oh, you're too young to retire.' But I said that I had been running competitively since I was 17, so my running age was high even though my biological age was not so high.
"So, you know, the last few years of my career, I really wanted to win but if I didn't it wasn't the end of the world. And when you have that attitude it's very hard to push yourself beyond what you need to push yourself."
Fifty-year-old Waitz was a guest at the opening of the National Track & Field Hall of Fame in New York. She dismissed the notion that such an attitude could make an athlete more relaxed in competition and therefore become a better performer.
"It's so competitive out there in running today," she added.
Waitz's athletic credentials are unparalleled.
Like O'Sullivan she moved up through the distances during her career, running in the first Olympic 1500 metres event at the Munich Olympics in 1972. She broke the 3000m world record twice in 1975 and ran her first marathon in 1978, breaking the world record to win the New York City marathon, the first of an unprecedented nine victories in the famous race.
The following year she was the first woman to go under 2hrs 30min when she broke her own world record, again in New York and Waitz went on to lower the mark twice more. In major championships, Waitz also had great success, winning gold in the 1983 World Championship Marathon, silver in the first Olympic marathon for women in 1984 as well as five World Cross-country Championship titles.
O'Sullivan, an Olympic silver medallist and world gold medallist over 5000m, has run two marathons to date, winning her debut race in Dublin in 2000 before lowering her personal best to 2:32.06 in New York in 2002.
But her 12th placed finish in the latter race, more than six minutes of the winner's pace, left her disappointed and questioning whether she would run the marathon again and Waitz said a good track career was no guarantee of success over the longer distance.
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