THEY lined up all week to tell us that Paula should not run. That is to say, they appeared on the BBC to tell BBC presenters that the BBC should miss out on one of the biggest televised sporting pulls of the year. Paula Radcliffe, a BBC Sports Personality of Year, more or less nurtured by the BBC, practically owned by the BBC. And respected pundits were saying that she should wipe away her tears and go home.
This was not what BBC executives wanted to hear. But they can always count on plucky Paula. Paula said yes, she would compete. Ha. Who was going to watch a repeat of Foyle’s War over on ITV now? “Michael. She’s running,” Sue Barker said to Michael Johnson, the best thing in the BBC studio. Michael was not overexcited. Competing is what athletes do, was Michael’s take on it all. “She would only do this if she feels she can accept whatever result she gets,” he said.
I suppose there was still a chance that Radcliffe might change her mind, might receive a text from a friend at home stating, “R u mad? Get back home now.” So Barker reassured us with a stern look. “Paula never runs away from a challenge,” she said. “If she had run away and gone home, she’d always be wondering, ‘What if?’ ” So there. The BBC w as doing Paula a service, really. A sort of mobile psychiatrist’s couch.
Colin Jackson wondered, though, would a bronze medal be good enough for Paula? Never mind Radcliffe, would it be good enough for the viewers who had dumped their usual Friday night routine to fit her in? In the end, a medal was a laughable idea. However, if you gasped in horror or astonishment as Radcliffe dropped out, then more fool you, for Brendan Foster was warning us well before the start and during the race that the whole notion of her competing was ludicrous.
Foster did not state this explicitly, of course, but his hints were heavy. Paula, he told us, would not have been in with a chance of a medal, even if she had not entered the marathon. The field was too strong for a fit, fresh young woman, let alone one who had stumbled and collapsed five days earlier. And we saw her stumble and grimace almost from the off. A bronze medal? Come off it, Colin.
Advertisement
Steve Cram was far more upbeat than Foster. Having interviewed Radcliffe as if she were royalty earlier in the week, Cram was completely behind her decision to run. “She’s racing for all the right reasons,” he gushed. Foster grumbled that five days previously she had been “sitting on a roadside”.
“Paula is in that bunch there surrounded by Africans,” Foster said. And if there is one moment in your life when you would rather not be surrounded by Africans, it is halfway though a 10,000 metres race in high heat and humidity. Radcliffe looked terrible. Foster saw it and told us that she had broken the laws of long-distance running by entering two tough races in a week. Foster tried to stay optimistic and told us that she needed to start picking off the athletes in front of her, but just as he said this, Radcliffe began to be overtaken.
“This was bound to happen . . . and she’s stopping,” Foster said, probably relieved not to have to commentate on the fruitlessness of it all any more. Radcliffe had one final humiliation — facing Sally Gunnell. “It has totally crushed me emotionally,” she told Gunnell. “I think she’s fine,” Johnson said. And I think, given that Radcliffe handled Gunnell with relative ease, Johnson is right.