Athletics: Crying shame for Radcliffe as marathon dream dies in heat

1.20pm - By MIKE ROWBOTTOM

ATHENS - Paula Radcliffe's entrance to the Panathinaiko Stadium was not supposed to have been like this.

For four years she has dreamed of setting the final garland on an honour-strewn career by arriving at the birthplace of the Modern Games as Olympic marathon champion.

Last night she made her arrival by ambulance after staggering to a halt less than four miles from the finish as she slipped back down to fourth place - the same bitter position she ended up in at the last Olympics, where she ran the 10,000 metres.

Confused and weeping, she was escorted to the medical centre wrapped in a foil blanket which, ironically, was intended to prevent her dehydrated body losing any more heat at the end of a brutal race along the hallowed course from Marathon which had began in temperatures above 100 degrees.

By way of a final, tragi-comic indignity, she was obliged to pass through the x-ray security barrier before being allowed to make her wobbly way down the deep tunnel that leads to the stadium medical centre.

Had the machine been able to read interior emotions, it would have registered a maelstrom of frustration, despair and misery in a woman who has, in the last two years, reshaped her event. It was hardly surprising that one of the first words she was overheard to say was "devastated".

No other woman has run within three minutes of the world record she set in London last year, but the 30-year-old knew that the searing conditions, and a course that contained not one but two brutal hills, the later lasting eight miles and rising 200m, would mean this race was a completely different proposition to the big city marathons where she has established her dominance.

It was still not clear after a race won by Japan's Mizuki Noguchi in 2hr 26min 20sec - more than 10 minutes slower than Radcliffe's world record of 2:15.25 - whether the Bedford runner had been affected by the calf problem which surfaced last month and prevented her running at the Crystal Palace Grand Prix on July 30.

But even in the early stages, Radcliffe - flushed, and nodding her head in that characteristic accompaniment to maximum effort - found the conditions punishingly tough. She nevertheless remained in the leading group of seven as they reached the halfway point in 1hr 14min 02sec.

It was in the early stages of the second climb that the Japanese runner, world silver medallist last year, made her break after being escorted to the crucial point by both her team-mates. Elfenesh Alemu, eventually fourth, responded, and Radcliffe dug in to try and hold a medal position.

It was when Catherine Ndereba came past her that something seemed to break inside the woman who had taken the Kenyan's world record.

Right alongside the red 36km marker, she slowed to a halt, putting her hand to her head, her face a mask of misery and exhaustion. Twice she tried to start running, stopping once to lean on a barrier and then eventually accepting her fate and slumping inconsolably at the roadside.

After all the ice baths, and the 260km a week training runs, and the special circulation-stimulating socks, and the frozen vests, and the monastic training regimes in Font Romeu and latterly southern Spain, of eat, run, sleep, eat, run, sleep, the finest female marathon runner was ultimately vulnerable.

As she sat distraught by the verge, Radcliffe looked at a television camera which was, inevitably, looking right back at her. The world was watching as she reacquainted herself with the persona she thought her long string of victories on track and road had banished - that of the gallant British loser.

Tracey Morris, who earned an Olympic appearance by cutting an hour off her personal best at the last Flora London run, achieved her own more realistic ambition of lasting the course, finishing 29th in 2:41.00, four places behind Britain's third runner, Liz Yelling, who clocked 2:40.13.

Morris was a relieved figure at the end, having recovered from a back injury which had put her participation in doubt.

"Just a few weeks ago I didn't know whether I would make it," said the woman who works for a Leeds optician. "I was delighted to have finished. It was an amazing experience."

Noguchi was followed home by Ndereda on to the dark Panathinaiko track which curled inside the marble steps of the stadium which hosted the 1896 Games like a stretch of scalextrix.

Ndereba had recovered after appearing likely to drop off the leading group in the early stages and eventually clocked 2:26.32. "The conditions were tough," she said. "But God was with me."

The bronze eventually went to Deena Kastor, of the United States, who overtook Alemu on the approach to the stadium and finished in 2:27.20.

- INDEPENDENT