We know you are going through hell, Paula, and you owe the nation nothing

Steve Williams, recalling the pain of Saturday’s gold-medal victory in the coxless fours, said that at moments of extremity an athlete asks his body a question: “. . . and it is a straight yes or no answer”.

Radcliffe has been asking those questions all her life but this time, when she called, there was no one home. Emptiness. An eerie, awful silence that wasn’t gold, silver, or even bronze. Nothing in her experience has prepared her for this, which is why she remains forlorn. She sat by the roadside, she said, because “I didn’t know the protocol for just getting out of there”. Welcome to Nowheresville, Paula. Welcome to hell.

This is not about losing a race, but an understanding of oneself. In pure competitive terms athletes lose all the time. Radcliffe has lost before in excruciating circumstances, most often as a front-running 10,000 metres specialist without a sprint finish, whose lot in life was to lead a field through 9,800 metres before being destroyed by a charging band of East Africans on the final bend. Her reaction was to run harder, to run farther.

On Sunday, however, she faced a decision few are challenged by until much later in life. In her world, a world of sporting excellence often beyond our comprehension, Radcliffe lost the will to live. The girl she knew died right there, four kilometres from the Panathinaiko Stadium, of a broken heart. Play the video frame by frame and you can almost identify the precise second when it happens, when all force, all resistance, washes out of her; when impossible, far from being nothing, becomes something so finite and so powerful it falls upon her like a lorry-load of bricks.

Officially, no one dies of a broken heart, but we all know it happens, even doctors. We remember the elderly relative who lost a soulmate and shuffled off without reason or illness a month or so later. “He just wasted away,” we nod sympathetically. “He didn’t want to be here after that.”

The terminally ill, too, deal with that reality, the realm of the possible. I had a friend who would grow incensed at stories of brave, heroic celebrities surviving cancer, as if those who didn’t (like her father) had somehow chickened out or didn’t want it enough. No one who gets cancer intends to die, she said. It is not bravery that keeps one alive, it is dumb luck.

Benign, malignant. Terminal, non-terminal. Possible, impossible. When Dame Iris Murdoch, the author, was told that she was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, her devoted husband took her gently by the arm and said: “Don’t worry, we’ll beat this.”

“No,” the doctor said, matter-of-factly. “You won’t.”

Radcliffe was described in some quarters yesterday as behaving as if bereaved and the person she is in mourning for is herself; the old Paula, the girl that bought the myth and built every waking hour around the belief that the laws of chemistry, biology and physics might be overcome by the glib optimism of a copywriter.

The poster boy for the “Impossible Is Nothing” campaign is Muhammad Ali. Yet if such slogans were true, he would no longer be a shuffling wreck at the mercy of Parkinson’s disease. Why can’t you just shake it off, champ? You quitting on your stool, like Sonny Liston? Not even the sportsman styled “The Greatest” is immune to the limits of possibility.

Radcliffe didn’t choke or lack courage on Sunday, as some visitors to website chat rooms suggest. Who dares level that accusation, anyway? What do any of us risk compared to the dance with death that is marathon running? In every aspect of her life, Radcliffe has shown courage, not least when making a defiant stand against doping at the 2001 World Championships in Edmonton, Canada.

After that she feared she could be spiked in an act of vengeance, an event that would have meant the end of her career. She thought about this, then went ahead anyway and unfurled a large banner that read “EPO CHEATS OUT” in the face of Olga Yegorova, a Russian 5,000 metres runner, who escaped a two-year ban on a technicality and won gold. That stance alone places Radcliffe ten miles clear of just about any other athlete on the block.

What would be piteous was if Radcliffe now attempted the 10,000 metres out of a misplaced sense of duty. One of the more specious arguments levelled at her since Sunday is that she let her supporters down, as if the purchase of a ticket somehow bound her to arrive at the Panathinaiko Stadium, crawling on bloodstained knees if necessary, to keep her side of a ten-quid contract. A picture has been painted of a stadium rapt with expectation, decorated with Union Jacks, following her every footstep, aching as she ached, fearing her fears, sharing her anticipation of triumph. It wasn’t like that at all.

I sat in the crowd on Sunday and as Radcliffe was enduring unimaginable mental anguish, opposite me was a lively conga line. The majority of British fans had positioned themselves near the finish, which would have made it extremely hard to trace Radcliffe’s progress on the large video screen at the open end of the U-shaped arena, and the commentary was laughably out of date, so when the announcer stated that Radcliffe was leading, the fans cheered anyway, despite live pictures clearly showing Mizuki Noguchi disappearing over the horizon.

Few were taking enough interest in the race to identify signs of frailty and distress — the cap coming off, the fact that she appeared to be running in the gutter for much of the time — but many did know all the actions to YMCA, by the Village People, and demonstrated this with gusto when it was played over the loudspeakers. It was, in short, a party with a happy atmosphere, complete with cheesy disco and tanked-up, over-heated uncles, and to say that the girl who was having to run 26 miles in 100-degree heat to join in is a bad sport for not showing up is beyond idiocy.

Yes, there was disappointment when it was finally noticed that the guest of honour was not to arrive; but for most of her journey Radcliffe could have been taken out by an erratic Athenian taxi driver and, provided that the DJ kept the Seventies disco classics coming, most would have been none the wiser. It is hard to imagine why they wanted to be there, anyway. Maybe they were expecting someone else. Russ Abbot, perhaps.

What does she owe us, anyway? A few quid of lottery funding, a 10p phone call to the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year? It is only recently that Radcliffe’s dedication and sacrifice has brought financial wealth and universal love. For that she has to run 140 miles a week, often at altitude. Act thick on Big Brother or have a fling with the England head coach and you can set yourself up for life in Britain these days. There are easier ways to make a living than marathon running.

Right now, the men’s coxless four are our nation’s heroes, but come mid-winter, when our Olympic rowers rise in cold and darkness to paddle up and down a freezing river, they will have only each other for company. “It’s just me and my mates,” as James Cracknell had it. For Radcliffe, it is an even lonelier existence. We think we travel together, but we are kidding ourselves. It is her. Only her. For miles and miles and miles. Her and the stupid little voice that fed the lie: impossible is nothing.

Where was that voice when she needed it on Sunday? Gone. Gone forever. She will come to rationalise it with time but, right now, Paula Radcliffe is alone and inconsolable. For good reason: you would cry, too, if you were abandoned by your best friend on the road to Athens.