Lost along the way

Television and radio, she handles. Then she moves along the line, stopping before a group of newspapermen. She gets through that. There is her husband Gary Lough, on the other side of the crash barrier. More soulmate than partner, he has been as central to her existence as any human being could be. She goes to him and, without a word, they hold each other.

So much had been put into this and for so little. No medal, no performance, nothing to show for so much effort. That’s the part they can’t accept. You give blood and sweat; and all you get are tears. It wasn’t meant to end like this. Their desolation is in the reluctance to separate, the fear of what lies before them. Not just this inquest, but the endless hours and days they will spend tormented by the unfathomable.

More journalists wait their turn; she feels dizzy and cries. A team official says she will come back.

The eyes are redder now, her face even paler. She explains why she had to go through this 10,000m. “I wanted to give myself a chance and I don’t have regrets. If I had watched the race on television, I would have been thinking, ‘should I have gone there, could I have run?’ I have run. I know the answer now; I couldn’t.

“But it’s never good to drop out of a race and I’m not a quitter. For me it would have been easy not to go out there and give myself that chance. I didn’t want to do lasting damage because my body had taken a severe beating up on Sunday. I wanted to go out there and run well for everybody.”

She cries again, composes herself, but the tears are now there all the time. Soon nobody has the heart to ask any more and she goes. The journalists at the back are curious. “What made her cry, what did someone say that made her break down?” If only it could be explained that easily, but it isn’t anything anybody has said. Can you not see? Is it not obvious? The woman with the biggest heart has a broken heart.

THEY went off into the night, alone. Though it was sad, it was appropriate, for it is they who will have to come to terms with this. There have been disappointments in the past but nothing like this. Every other defeat could be explained; often there was something to take away, a memory to light up a winter’s training run. From here there is nothing but the numbness of overwhelming defeat.

In every story, in every experience, there is meaning and, however long it takes, Radcliffe will find it. She will start at the beginning, herself. For here is a woman of extraordinary willpower; no sacrifice is too great, there is no deprivation that cannot be tolerated. None of us know how much she wanted that Olympic medal.

The Atlanta Games were her first and although she said she was disappointed with fifth place, she truly wasn’t. After the races had finished, she went for a gentle run with two British 800m runners, Curtis Robb and Craig Winrow.

“Paula,” Robb joked, “all we have to do is sit on you and then leave you at the finish.”

“Don’t wind her up,” said Winrow, “for God’s sake, don’t wind her up.”

At that time Winrow knew her better than Robb and understood that Radcliffe hardly needed an excuse to turn a gentle run into something faster. And, of course, the taunts made her go faster. Before it was over, Robb knew Winrow had been right, he should never have wound her up.

She wanted to run — and fast. She wanted to be the best she could be and whatever that took, she would give. Lough once told a story about their nights in Albuquerque where they went for altitude training. “We got into the habit of watching a television programme, Diagnosis Murder, which was every night except Sunday. It ran from nine to ten and ten o’clock is Paula’s bedtime.

“So at the first commercial break, she would go to the bathroom and wash. Second break she brushed her teeth. When the programme ended, she was ready to go straight to bed. Ten o’clock never became 10.20.”

That dedication touched him, inspired him even. A high-class 1500m runner until injury ended his career, he wanted her success more than he had wanted it for himself.

What makes Radcliffe different is her endurance. Not stamina, endurance. She can cope with the endlessly tough training runs, the best physical therapy that pain can buy, the early nights, the monotony of repetitive training days. She takes them in her stride. She trains around the Lac de Matermale high up in the Pyrenees, at that time of year when the snow melts and the stream from the mountains is like iced water. After each run, she bathes for ten minutes in this water. “Your legs tingle, the blood rushes into them and afterwards you can feel it for about an hour, the tingling. At first your veins constrict, then they open again and the act of opening and closing brings a greater rush of blood through the area and that promotes quicker recovery.”

How could a woman, so willing to give everything she has, have been so cruelly treated in Athens?

THE experience of finishing fourth in the 10,000m at the Sydney Olympics had a profound effect on Radcliffe. She led the race for most of the way but could not withstand the late surges of the Ethiopians Derartu Tulu and Gete Wami, and the Portuguese Fernanda Ribeiro. At the line she collapsed, almost unconscious with exhaustion.

Inspired by her determination, the British public acclaimed her. But, for her, fourth was nothing. She saw how it affected Gary, how it had taken him months to get over it. She looked at what happened on that final lap and concluded she had not been strong enough. If she trained harder, prepared more thoroughly, gave more of herself, that would never happen again.

In Lough, she had a natural accomplice. He, too, was single-minded, driven by the same desire to train harder, go further, redraw the boundaries of women’s distance running. The victories came, the world half-marathon title, the world cross-country title, victory in the London Marathon, the world record in the Chicago Marathon until, finally, one of the most extraordinary performances in the history of distance running, 2.15.25 in last year’s London Marathon.

These performances were drawn from the well of the woman’s selflessness. She gave everything she had, and then some more. Years before, the director of athletics at Loughborough College, George Gandy, had said to Radcliffe’s coach Alec Stanton that “he would get some of the lads to take her on some nice runs at seven-minute mile pace”.

“Good luck to you,” said Stanton, “if you can ever get that girl to run a mile at seven-minute mile pace.”

Of course, he didn’t. Nowadays, her normal pace for tempo runs is 5.40 and that is her taking it easy. You saw her train, heard Lough exhort her to go faster, and it was staggering to see humans willingly put themselves through so much.

But still it went wrong and they will wonder why.

One memory resurfaces. Before that exhilarating performance in last year’s London Marathon, Radcliffe read Bryce Courtenay’s book The Power of One. It told the story of Peekay, the white English boy who grows up in the harsh Afrikaans’ world of South Africa. A brilliant boxer and a fine scholar, he dreamed of becoming welterweight champion of the world and going to Oxford.

There was much in Peekay’s story with which Radcliffe could empathise, for she too was a brilliant athlete and an excellent student. “How about Peekay,” I asked sometime later, “did he become champion of the world?” “You don’t find out,” she said. “The story takes you through his life, the ups and downs, the sacrifices he makes to achieve his dream, but you never discover if he becomes champion, that’s not what the book is about. It is about his quest, how it makes him strong, a better person. It is about a journey and the effect the journey has on him. It’s a story about a journey, not a destination.”

When the meaning of what Radcliffe has suffered in Athens begins to seep to the surface, that will be one of her questions: was the destination for once allowed to be more important than the journey? Did the Olympic marathon become just too big? In time they will wonder if they were right to race so little this year, whether it was wise to cut themselves off from the oxygen of competition. How can a woman who so loves racing compete so little and still get as much fun from her sporting life? Radcliffe raced twice in the months before last Sunday.

Determined that nothing would interfere with her focus on the Olympic marathon, she and Gary and Paula’s physical therapist, Gerard Hartmann, spent week after week in Font Romeu, where the three gave everything they had to a quest that shaped every minute of every day. Sensitive to how committed Lough and Hartmann were; Radcliffe trained harder and pushed herself even further.

To better protect her focus, she went to a warm-weather training camp in Spain while the GB team went to Cyprus. There were no interviews, no photo shoots, nothing to lessen the intensity of the preparation. They will wonder now if it might have been better to link up earlier with the team, to have been more accessible to the media? Questions that will need to be resolved.

Maybe, in the months leading up to Athens, Radcliffe gave it too much. A minor calf muscle strain, followed by a minor knee injury; four days off, then another three and with it came the anxiety. What if her body was saying, “too much, too much, you’ve gone too far?” With those minor injuries came major stress. Journalists inquired how things were and two people who normally like to tell the truth felt they couldn’t give straight answers because public concern would add to their doubts. Sometimes, in trying to create utopia, you build a prison: they couldn’t tell how things were and so the burden just felt greater.

However the injuries chipped away at her confidence, or the attendant worry depleted her energy, the woman who turned up at Marathon last Sunday was not the Paula Radcliffe we know. Rather she was a shadow of the great Radcliffe. On the journey to the greatest destination of her career, she lost something along the way.

One couldn’t help feel sadness at the outcome. As she sat in a conference room on Monday last and tried to explain how she felt, Lough stood at the back of the room. Alison Curbishley, the former athlete and BBC radio Five Live presenter, stood beside him and held his hand while Zara Hyde Peters of the GB team tenderly rubbed his back from the other side. It was almost like a funeral, with Lough the next-of-kin.

And then on Friday night as they left the stadium, you wondered about the agony that lies before them: the replays, the questions, the search for answers. It wasn’t meant to end like this.

Neither did it deserve to end like this.