Bobbing head & Iron Lady

So it appears that the great Paula Radcliffe's (PR) racing days might be over.  It's always sad when such an iconic figure bows out; especially so when the timing isn't all it should be because of injury.  PR's career was pretty special, winning World Championships on the track, road and cross country; competing in five Olympic Games (with a best of 4th); European and Commonwealth gold medals and records; plus sundry world records on the road, the stand out performance being her amazing 2:15:25 at London 10 years ago on 13 April 2003.

Sadly, of course, she'll be remembered for all the wrong reasons.  The Athens Olympic Games of 2004 was the start of the vilification of PR after she dropped out of the marathon.  The gold medal had been virtually hung around her neck before she started the race, such was her domination of the sport at that time, but an injury just before the Games, together with her reaction in her stomach - the runners nightmare - to the anti-inflammatories and the intense heat of the Greek summer, all contributed to her not finishing.  She got a hammering from the press and public, most unfairly in my view, and in many ways was never quite the same again.

An incident in 2001 tells us a lot about PR and helps to show what went wrong in recent years.  Straight after finishing 4th in the Edmonton Commonwealth Games 10,000, missing a medal by less than a second, she and her husband Gary Lough, a top athlete himself, had a raging argument on the track in front of the whole crowd and millions watching on tv.  He wasn't happy with the way she ran her race, having effectively ignored what had been discussed in advance and paid the price.  PR was stubborn ...

This might seem a bit radical but in many ways PR became the sporting equivalent of the late Maggie Thatcher in politics.  They both ended up being more important than those around them and thus decided to do everything in their own blinkered way ... with disastrous consequences.  On the face of it distance running is not a complicated sport, it's not rocket science as someone once put to me.  Granted, that is true in many ways - although in that case why are there so few decent runners around these days compared to the past - but at the highest levels just slight adjustments can make all the difference.  The job of a good coach / mentor is to monitor this balance, it can't be done by the blinkered & driven individual who can't see the wood for the trees.

One example to finish: last summer before the Olympics (and before she'd withdrawn from the British team), PR ran in a money-making half marathon handicap race in Vienna against Haile Gebrselassie - she started about seven minutes ahead of him, based on their pb's - her only race in 2012, a crazy decision made even worse by the fact that she was still on antibiotics following an infection.  Somebody in her team or UK Athletics should have told her not to run but she did and suffered accordingly.  That was the story of her career for most of the last few years.