PAULA RADCLIFFE will be making a mistake if, as seems likely, she steps up to the start line of the 10,000 metres in Athens this evening. That is the view of two of her closest allies, Liz McColgan, the Scottish former 10,000 metres world champion, and Ingrid Kristiansen, the Norwegian who is one of the greats of women’s distance running.
The advice from McColgan and Kristiansen is that, even if the body is strong, Radcliffe cannot have sufficiently recovered from the mental scars of failing to complete Sunday’s marathon in time to be prepared for today’s race. “My personal view is that it would be a mistake,” McColgan said yesterday. “Even if she runs well, all that mental anguish is going to take its toll. The people around her should have advised her that enough is enough. If she was my daughter — my athlete, my sister, my wife — I’d have advised her not to put herself through it. No one wants to see her successful more than I do. I know the work she’s put in and I’m a big supporter of hers. She’s a human being who I feel for.”
Kristiansen said: “I don’t think it’s smart. She has almost run a marathon, she’s very disappointed, she can’t be mentally prepared to do it. I hope she does well, but I’m afraid that she won’t.”
Kristiansen and Radcliffe have been friends over the years and the Briton has occasionally turned to the Norwegian for help and advice. “I e-mail her now,” Kristiansen said. “I have just started a letter to her in which I am saying that she must pick herself up and be positive. I know how it feels to be disappointed — I did two Olympic marathons and failed twice. Being the best and not winning, it’s so tough.”
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But being positive does not involve running again. “Had she won the marathon, I think the 10,000 metres would have been possible,” Kristiansen said. “It would certainly have been much easier. But she’s disappointed and it’s tough to take that into a new race.” McColgan and Kristiansen believe that, physically, it is possible to follow Emil Zatopek, the great Czech, and do both events.
“For the last four years,” McColgan said, “she’s been doing a long run on a Sunday — something in the region of 22 miles — and then a fast track session on the Tuesday. So she’s done it in training. The difference here is that Sunday wasn’t a training session. And you go back to all that mental anguish — there’s a lot of things she had to deal with on Sunday that she’s never faced before. When push comes to shove, I don’t know if her legs have it in them.”
Kristiansen believes that the marathon will have affected the mindset of Radcliffe’s rivals as well as her own. “Her legs are tired compared to the other girls who haven’t just run a marathon,” she said.
“And the other girls will have seen what happened on Sunday in the marathon and they will adapt their tactics. They will now do everything to stay with her. Paula is always a front-runner — she doesn’t care about the others.
“What happened in the marathon was she wasn’t in front, she couldn’t break away from the field and so she started thinking negatively and thinking negatively is really tiring. I’m afraid it will be the same in the 10,000 metres, that she won’t be able to break away because her legs are so tired and so she’ll be thinking negatively again.”
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Kristiansen believes that Radcliffe simply chose the wrong event.