FIVE Olympic Games ago, Greg Louganis had one dive left. Hit it perfectly and it was gold. Miss it even slightly and he had failed. What was going through your head up there, Greg? “I knew that whatever happened, my mother would always love me,” he said.
Perhaps Paula Radcliffe lacks that crucial certainty. Perhaps she feels that she can only be loved for what she does, never for what she is. That, at least, explains the soul-deep trauma she experienced on Sunday, on the road from Marathon to Athens when she saw the moment of her greatness flicker.
And gave up. But yesterday the runner who refused to run at least refused to bolt. She gave a genuinely affecting, tear-dampened press conference that refused all funk-pits, excuses and weasellings. Time at least for a rethink about Radcliffe and the courage department.
She said that she was as unable to understand what had happened as she was unable to come to terms with it. She hasn’t a clue why she gave up. “I just had nothing in my legs,” she said.
But she was not dehydrated, she didn’t blame the heat or the hills or the pollution or the press or the movements of the stars. She is undergoing a series of tests and they may give a clue about the physical reason for her poor performance. It won’t tell her why she gave up, but that seems quite clear. She gave up because she wasn’t going to win. She was utterly unable to accept that reality. And so the knowledge utterly destroyed her.
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Yesterday, she faced her press conference with courage and honesty. But oh, that face, those tears, those gentle cooing voices all around her: tell me, dear one, who died? But it is all our fault, is it not? Why do we love Paula so? Because she is sweet and pretty and a runner? Up to a point. It is because she is sweet and pretty and a winner. She didn’t become a living national treasure when she lost at the Olympic Games in Sydney. But she did when she won three marathons on the trot, two in London and one in Chicago, setting records in each one.
We admired that dedication to winning. We wanted her to think of nothing but victory, for the pleasure it would give us. We wanted her single-minded. We didn’t want her to have a sane perspective on life: we wanted her to be a driven individual running thousands of miles every year, because her victories brought joy to us.
Carolina Klüft, the Swedish heptathlete, said that winning her gold medal last weekend was no big deal. “I have other gold medals I want to win in my private life,” she said.
But Radcliffe has no such vision of her own life. It seems that, for her, pleasure in life, meaning in life — and perhaps even love itself — are all victory-dependent. Nothing else can explain the power and depth of this tragedy that isn’t a tragedy. With an athlete’s terrible self-obsession she kept returning to her own feelings. The line at the press conference that made her weep was this: “No one was hurting inside like I was.”
She was crying, then, for herself, frank tears of self-pity. I mean, poor girl, you felt desperately for her, of course you did, unless you were made of stone. There there, come here, be embraced, my God you’re beautiful, drink this nice champagne, take my hankie, have another sip and, by the way, did I ever tell you, you were beautiful? But it wouldn’t have worked. Her need was to be fast, not beautiful, and she wasn’t. More than fast: she needed to be first. It seemed that her entire life was based on the premise of winning the Olympic marathon on Sunday: pretty high stakes, then. And she lost.
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No wonder that, for her, losing a race is a tragedy that has practically wrenched the soul from her body.
Would a more sensible perspective on the race have helped her to win it? But mad obsessives win things too: perhaps the rarer ones are those with the sanity of Klüft or the perspective of Louganis. Hell, we more or less canonised and unquestionably knighted Sir Steve Redgrave as a reward for his obsession with Olympic victory. No one ever suggested that he should lighten up, not while he was winning. It was too much fun.
We all take sport pretty seriously while we watch it, because enjoyment of sport depends on a certain seriousness of approach: at the very least, a belief that this extraordinary stuff is worth doing. But then we can walk away from it, switch off the telly and walk back into the splendid ordinariness of our lives.
Athletes are forbidden this pleasure. They must carry on believing long after the telly has been switched off. They must believe that sport matters massively and that victory matters rather more. The flaw with this world view is that defeat becomes a burden impossible to bear: connected as it is with loss of love.