Radcliffe’s greatness will endure despite Olympic failures

The first time I interviewed Paula Radcliffe was towards the end of 2002, when we still used the good old cassette tape voice recorder. That tape is long since erased but the memory of the interview will always remain.

Radcliffe sat on a chair in front of me, and while I fumbled with a page of loosely scribbled questions, she offered to hold the recorder, placing it on her impossibly thin kneecap. Then, after side one of the tape ran out, she flipped it over to side two, and gave me another 30 generous minutes of her time.

We were sitting in the Limerick clinic of own physical therapist to the stars, Gerard Hartmann, whose unflappable sporting positivity Radcliffe considered an essential part of her training regime – especially when it came to recovering from the 150 miles of running every week. Indeed Radcliffe was in Limerick that week recovering from the Chicago Marathon, where, just a few days earlier, she had run a then world record of 2:17:18, breaking the previous women’s record by a 1½ minutes.

Confidence

She spoke with persistently refreshing modestly and also with an unmistakable confidence. This was the runner who in previous years had been seen as the gallant loser, especially on the track. Fifth in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics over 5,000m, then an agonising fourth over 10,000m in Sydney, she’d also finished fourth in the 1997 World Championships 5,000m, and, believe it or not, was fourth again in the 2001 World Championships 10,000m.

In 2002, however, Radcliffe was an entirely different running machine. She'd redesigned her running style, and although not instantly apparent, an improved body alignment and a little less bobbing of the head now fully complemented her already extraordinary engine. She started that year by winning the World Cross Country, staged at Leopardstown, then three weeks later, in what was her 26.2-mile debut, she comfortably won the London Marathon in 2:18:55, the then second-fastest ever.

So, having now just run a world record in Chicago, Radcliffe made absolutely clear in that interview how the marathon felt like her perfect distance. It was just under two years out from the 2004 Athens Olympic marathon, yet even then she was comfortably considering herself the gold medal favourite. If I told her then what I know now, that she’d fail in her next three attempts to win an Olympic medal in the marathon, she could only have responded with incomprehensible silence.

Unstoppable

Because she felt like she was unstoppable and for a while she was. Five months after that interview, she returned to the London Marathon and ran 2:15:25 – which even now, stands as the most incredible world record in the books (the next best woman is still over three minutes slower). She finished 2003 with further world records on the road over 5k, 10k and the half-marathon – and in the run-up to the Athens Olympics, I wrote her up as “unbeatable”. It just seemed no woman in the world who could touch Radcliffe, even if she was running on one leg.

Yet by the time she lined up in Athens she may as well have been running on one leg. Three weeks earlier, while finishing a training run in Portugal, a car sped past on the gravelly road, its tyres firing a few small stones into the air. One of them hit Radcliffe on that impossibly thin kneecap, and although it only mildly hurt, it later developed into a blood abscess, deep inside the knee.

Soon, she could hardly bend her leg, and arrived in Athens without running any considerable distance in three weeks, while feeding on the strongest anti-inflammatory that money could buy.

No one needs any reminding of what happened next, and the image of Radcliffe sitting on the Athens kerb at 23 miles, crying her eyes out, will always remain. It wasn’t quite as shattering in Beijing, four years later, when her preparations were again hampered by injury and she finished a distant 23rd; or indeed in 2012, when Radcliffe was preselected for the London Olympics, only to drop out a week before the start, again with a crippling leg injury. She hasn’t run a competitive race since.

Past heroics

All of which begs the question why on earth Radcliffe is lining up for Sunday’s London Marathon, again hampered by injury, this time a crusty Achilles tendon. At 41 her best years are definitely behind her, although all this week she’s been happily recounting her past heroics and failures, and the one everlasting moment of them all is that 2:15:25 she ran in London in 2003. So now, having worked perhaps as hard as she ever has to get somewhat race fit again, she’s surrendering to one last irresistible urge to step back into the arena she once ruled.

And for that who can blame her? She’s being rightfully remembered in the build-up to tomorrow’s race not just as one of Britain’s greatest athletes, but an athlete we may never again see the likes of (not forgetting her ardent stance on anti-doping, either).

And this despite the fact she must also be remembered as not just the greatest athlete that never won an Olympic gold medal, but never won an Olympic medal of any colour. Part of her popularity was this fragility, and her unique willingness to embrace the pain and suffering of distance running – and for that a suitably painful lap of honour that lasts 26.2 miles around the streets of London is a wonderfully fitting send off.