Sonia retains 5,000m title and gets ready to take on the world

SONIA O’SULLIVAN raced to her 12th national senior track title when she retained her 5,000m title at the national track and field championships at Morton Stadium and declared herself ready for the world championships in Paris in just under two weeks time.

“I’m ready. I’ve done lots of training and I think the main thing is just to get a few races together to sharpen up,” she said.

She could hardly have been more impressive yesterday. She settled into a disappointingly small field ­ just five competitors ­ as Breda Dennehy-Willis took them around in 76-75 second laps with the first two kilometres just about even paced at 3:08 and 3:09.