Running down race that will never end

Keith Duggan Sideline CutAt least this time Paula Radcliffe will not have to worry about heat exhaustion. The English girl's Olympic breakdown already seems so set in stone and distant that the shock is not that tomorrow's adventure in New York is her first race since that odd and moving melodrama but that she is still running at all.

Such is the immensity and overblown pageantry of the summer Olympics that we tend to forget that unlike the symbolic torch that burned in Athens for that fortnight, athletes are not simply extinguished when the crowds leave. Yet so bereft and inconsolable and - finally - beaten did Radcliffe appear as she sat weeping in a bland suburban side street last August, the unavoidable conclusion was that the light within her, quintessentially English in its merry pluck and fortitude, had been put out.

There was a genuine cruelty to the way that Radcliffe's Olympic coronation fell apart so spectacularly. In retrospect, the uneasy weeks of her final preparation and the gradual way in which she was dropped from the leading group in the race made it seem as if it had been planned that way by the gods just to taunt her. The event she had made her metier betrayed her and presented her with a choice that summoned up all the near-glories of her earlier middle distance life: Quit or face another fourth place.

And although, given Radcliffe's troubled preparation and the enormity of her personal distress, compounded by the trauma of her doomed attempt to run the Olympic 10,000 metres just five nights later, there was the niggling, unavoidable fact that the bravest and most obdurate of athletes had consciously chosen to quit. And quitting is one of the last remaining stigmas in sport, one of the few violations that even the Olympics can frown upon.

Although Radcliffe has offered a brief explanation of the scientific reasons for her implosion, only she alone knows if she could have continued to press on through those final kilometres last August, despite the cloying, early evening heat and her depleted energy resources and the awful knowledge that yet again the winner's wreaths and ultimate success was destined for another.

For there was the sensation, sitting in the horseshoe stadium built in 1896, marble tipped and perfumed with the newly laid cinder track, that Radcliffe would have been given an ovation that would have remained with her to old age even if she trailed in last. Even if she trailed in when nobody but the gatekeeper remained to usher her through.

For there was a spiritual dimension to that race, the 2004 Athens marathon, that rendered it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for any athlete. Radcliffe, with her principled but never pompous stance on doping and her wincing expressions and her head bobbing as she raced in the shadow of the world's middle distance speed merchants for the last 10 years, gave substance to the notion that winning is not everything. She competed. She ran to the point of collapse and was picked up - most memorably by Sonia O'Sullivan in Sydney four Septembers ago - and started again.

In Athens, however, she concluded that winning was the only option for her.

When that cherished victory, dressed up by the British newspapers and television in the weeks leading up to the Olympics as a fait accompli, failed to transpire, one shuddered to think how Radcliffe would again find solace on the track. The Olympics distorts perspective, of course, but at the time it was clear that all her life had been leading to that moment, that night.

And when it came down to it, with her expectant guests all dressed up and sipping cocktails, she never even made it as far as the red carpet. The most obvious questions centred on how Radcliffe the runner would recover from that night of tears and, in a terrible way, of shame.

The answer will be found on the streets of New York this weekend. Although a fairly gentle and understated person, some part of Radcliffe's make-up seems irresistibly drawn to the bright lights. Far from returning to big-time competition at some sleepy provincial meet, she simply couldn't resist the temptation of running against names like Deena Kastor and Meb Keflezighi, ghosts of her Athenian summer, in a marathon that has become global event. Whether this race is "too soon" or not in terms of her winning it is irrelevant.

Even if she finishes with the working women and part-time athletes, the guess is that she will finish the race regardless. And given that she is again racing on the paved streets of North America on a bright chilly weekend morning - conditions similar to those in which she first discovered that in the marathon, she could be untouchable - who knows what might happen.

Either way, whatever doubts and recriminations and disappointments continue to rage within Radcliffe are being expunged on those long, isolated daily runs she has been undergoing in Flagstaff, Arizona. If she thinks about her ruined Olympic hopes at all, it must have been on those solitary desert runs of 20 miles or more. She has already begun to refer to Athens as one would an outer-body experience, a close encounter of the third kind. It was something that happened to me, she said. She likened it to a numbness.

Sports people accustomed to dealing in times and specifics resort to vagueness when it comes to instances beyond their control. It is perfectly understandable that Radcliffe, who gave a harrowing and tearful account of her feelings a couple of days after the marathon in August, has no great desire in explaining precisely what happened to her. It is probably easier to box it away as simply one of those freaks, an unlikely combination of circumstances that could not possibly conspire against her again.

However, at 30, the girl who has courted incredible popularity through thick and thin in England will be conscious that for her only so many races lie ahead.

Despite holding the world record in the marathon, it would seem that the distress and disappointment of Athens are set to be her epitaph at this moment in time.

But like any person drawn to sport, she has to cling on to the logic of a desperate optimist. That there is still time is one of the most common refrains in all of sport. And there is still time for Radcliffe to enjoy the feeling of great accomplishments in the future. Nothing, not even a late flowering as an Olympic champion in Beijing, can ever erase the fact that in Athens Paula Radcliffe stopped running on what was the night of nights for the ancient race.

But under the shadow of New York's skyscrapers this weekend, she can begin the business of balancing the scales again, of winning races and putting enough miles between herself and the race which, because she did not finish, she will be running for the rest of her life.