Sports person of the year - Sarah Ulmer

World champion, world recordholder, Olympic champion.

Six words which explain why Sarah Ulmer is the Herald's premier sports performer of 2004.

When athletes look back on their careers, they often go through a dose of "what if", wondering if they had done everything possible to succeed in their sport.

Ulmer won't. In the space of four months she left everything out on the track, achieved everything she could want in her specialist cycling event, the 3000m individual pursuit.

The result was a place in Olympic and New Zealand sporting legend.

There were other high-calibre candidates for the top honour.

Rowing's twins Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell, so dominant in their double sculls discipline that they have not been beaten since the world championships of 2001, won Olympic gold on Lake Schinias in August.

So did triathlon hero Hamish Carter, putting the despair of a flunked Sydney Olympic campaign four years previously behind him with a stunning display on a draining Athens morning.

But 28-year-old Ulmer's collective results over the year put her a notch above her fellow Olympic champions.

She won World Cup races in Mexico and Sydney, but the big step came at the world championships in Melbourne in May.

She clocked 3m 30.604s in her opening ride for a world record, and went on to join Karen Holliday and Athens team-mate Greg Henderson as New Zealand's senior world track champions.

Then at Athens, in a stunning two days, she eclipsed her own mark in qualifying, recording 3m 26.400s, before capping off a golden year the next day in the final.

She whizzed round the open-ended velodrome in 3m 24.537s, nailing the gold against Australian Katie Mactier.

"This year, hardly anything went wrong," Ulmer told the Weekend Herald. "It was just a dream."

All along her focus was on August 21, the qualifying day in Athens, but along the way she and her coach and partner Brendon Cameron had earmarked events they wanted to dominate, stepping stones towards Greece.

"We didn't have any results in mind, we never thought medals or anything," she said. "In terms of our approach, we had a project, where we were going to go, how we were going to do it and it pretty much worked according to plan."

As for the future the deciding factor is likely to be whether the inner drive to carry on and stay at the top is still there.

Ulmer evades the hard question. She wants to enjoy Christmas, see in the New Year before contemplating the Melbourne Commonwealth Games early in 2006. As for the Beijing Olympics, that's four years away.

"I'm totally year by year," Ulmer said. "I have a project for a year, work towards it, then wipe the slate clean."

And she's earned the right to do it her way.