Athletics: Gunnell hurries past the hoopla: Mike Rowbottom on the road to further riches in Stuttgart for the best track athlete in Britain

WHAT song does Sally Gunnell like to sing in the bath or shower? She often sings 'I Want To Make It With You' by Bread. What one thing would she spend her last fiver on? Chocolates or anything really sweet or naughty. Is there now a giraffe named Sally Gunnell at London Zoo? Yes, there is.

Celebrity, with all its attendant inquiries and tributes, has been inescapable for this 27-year-old farmer's daughter from Chigwell since running what she described as the first race where everything went right for her in the final of the Olympic 400 metres hurdles last August.

It was a triumph she had worked towards since making the worst mistake of her career a year earlier in the final of the World Championships, when she miscalculated her strides at the last hurdle and lost her chance of the title.

For two months before the Games began in Barcelona she mentally rehearsed winning in all the varying circumstances she could imagine; the only thing she could not picture was receiving the gold medal afterwards - 'I felt I would be tempting fate if I thought further ahead than that,' she said.

She was the same in her attitude to earning further gold from this sudden elevation in status. The day after her victory, having slept with the medal under her pillow, she had no clear vision of how she would exploit the commercial possibilities that now lay open.

She thought she would probably leave any business arrangements to her coach, Bruce Longden, as she always had done. She thought she would go back to her part-time job as a research assistant for the London accountancy firm where she had worked for six years. More immediately, she planned to run for Essex Ladies in the GRE Cup final.

A year on, some of that endearing naivety has gone. Having signed with an agent, she found her off-track schedule being directed more judiciously. 'Up until Christmas, she tired herself out going to lunches and openings,' Mark Rowland, the agent in question, said. 'Then she remembered what she was there for. It is a balancing act and she's getting more used it. The primary consideration this season has been to ensure that she is fit and focused for the World Championships.'

As she completes her preparations in the calming surrounds of Zofingen, a small Swiss village, she can reflect upon a season that has been as smooth and assured as her hurdling technique.

The programme has been deliberately varied. She has run flat out over 300 and 400 metres. She has sharpened up her start and technique by taking a record seventh 110m hurdles title in the combined AAA Championships and world championship trials. And at 400m hurdles she has been unbeaten.

In a curious way, the distractions and demands which followed from becoming Britain's first female Olympic track gold medallist since Ann Packer in 1964 have worked in her favour. Her five-week stint presenting sport for BSkyB TV, her selection of other television appearances and her welter of PR outings served to concentrate her mind. 'I think I felt guilty about missing time so I was training harder,' she said.

Such has been her predominance in her main event - where she has beaten almost all of her rivals, including the vibrant but technically clumsy Olympic silver medallist, Sandra Farmer-Patrick - that her other races have often provided her with a more genuine challenge.

'It's been a case of trying to keep the concentration going,' said Jon Bigg, who married Gunnell last October. 'Sometimes in the 400 hurdles she has been head and shoulders over the other competitors. You get complacent when you don't have to race at full stretch. That's why her 300 metres win at Gateshead was perfect. She and Pauline Davis were running to the bone.'

While all her American rivals have been beaten at least once this season, the absence from the circuit of two leading Russians - the 30- year-old former world record-holder Margarita Ponomaryova and the woman who beat her at the 1991 World Championships in Tokyo,

Tatyana Ledovskaya - gave

Gunnell cause for concern.

Her victory in Zurich last Wednesday, when she lowered her world-best time this season to 53.52sec, came against a field which included Ponomaryova. Ledovskaya, fifth in last year's Olympic final, has not been seen racing this year. 'She is a real dark horse,' Gunnell said. 'You just have to look at what she did in Tokyo. We didn't know her, but she came out and beat us all.'

Do not bet on it happening again. 'I have not got a world championship gold,' Gunnell said. 'And I'm not far off the world record.'

Do bet on her remaining the same kind of person even if her highest ambitions are achieved. 'I was on the circuit for quite a few years before Barcelona,' she said. 'I have seen too many people change in my profession because of success. You have to remember where your roots are.'

In the meantime, however, the celebrity status remains. If she could bring one famous person back to life, who would it be? Walt Disney. Is she kinder to children or animals? She loves them equally. What is she most likely to be heard whingeing about? Her husband, for leaving cupboard doors open . . .

(Photograph omitted)