Cancel The Natural Effect Of A Label To Use Onmousedown?

In a nutshell: I have an html code that looks like this:

<span class="someClass">
Beginning of a text
<label>[code]....

What I wanted to do is to transform it into this: Beginning of the text option 1 end of the text.where option 1 would, onclick, change into option 2 (checking the appropriate radio button at the same time)

The result of clicking option 1 would then be:Beginning of the text option 2 end of the text and you would know that the radio button for option 2 is checked.

This way, by clicking on option 1 or option 2, you get to see the change in the "sentence".b.t.w the reason I wanted to have radio buttons in the first place was, firstly,to pass the chosen information in the form, but also to avoid loosing functionnality when javascript is disabled.The reason why I chose to wrap the labels around the radio buttons is so that clicking the text would check the appropriate radio button..( I could use the for attribute, but thought it would be easier this way as far as scripting goes)here is what I did (in english, and in javascript[code].....

All of this works wonderfully, except in opera. I think it is because opera does what I say, but then proceeds to checking the radio button associated to the clicked label (as a label should do). In other words, the script is useless since opera does the label effect after my script has taken place, cancelling my script's effect.The reason I think this, is because I tried putting an alert where the red comment is and that solved the problem. I'm guessing that the alert prevented me from completing my click action (because the alert box has and keeps the focus), thus preventing the natural label activity.