ON MATURE reflection, perhaps a 22-mile run and what looked like a total breakdown of body and personality was not the right preparation for the most gruelling event in the Olympic Stadium. Give her due: last night Paula Radcliffe was there. Alas, it was not the Paula Radcliffe we have got used to over the last couple of years.
Last night it was confirmed. The Girl Who Runs has become The Girl Who Stops. Last Sunday she dropped out of the Marathon after 22 miles in a storm of tears. Last night, she dropped out of the 10,000 metres with 3,500 to go — and did so with an air of weary resignation. “My legs were beaten up by the marathon,” she said.
It’s hell being ordinary. True, most of us get used to it. But once you have had a go at being extraordinary, it’s hard to accept that you are just like everybody else. Last night, Radcliffe was Superwoman with green kryptonite, a witch with her wand broken, one of those Greek goddesses forced to relinquish immortality.
She had a crack at running like Paula of old, taking the race from the front and destroying the field with relentless pace. But she found that she just can’t do relentless pace now. One runner passed her, another, another. Soon she was clinging on the back of the leading group: and so with one of sport’s easy cruelties, she was left behind.
Her weakness exposed, the lesser runners came after her and left her trailing. The world-beater was being beaten, it seemed, by the whole world. This was supposed to be the week for which her entire life had been a preparation. In a sense it was: but not quite the way she wanted. She had failed to get a medal at the two previous Olympics: but then she emerged from the chrysalis of mediocrity to fly. She was, for a while, a truly dominant runner of beauty and purpose and self-certainty.
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But it was a fragile and evanescent beauty, and it could not stand the uncompromising bleakness that is the testing ground of the Games. Alas, poor Paula. She may yet amaze us again, though that is unlikely. But she certainly (though what is certainly?) won’t have another chance for an Olympic gold medal. She has known despair this week: but last night she found something else. She found ordinariness.
In contrast, another Briton, unheard of by most of us before this week, set himself firmly on the path to greatness. The 17-year-old boxer Amir Khan, with the strutting self-confidence of youth, overcame a slow start to easily beat his semi-final opponent, Serik Yeleuov of Kazakhstan. He now meets the reigning Olympic champion Mario Kindelán in the battle for gold.
Whatever the outcome, it has been an extraordinary trip for the kid from Bolton.