Radcliffe in Need of a Fun Run

Only 11 weeks after presenting one of the bleakest, most heartbreaking sporting images of the summer as she wept inconsolably on an Athens roadside, her dream of winning an Olympic marathon gold medal dashed, it would seem understandable for Paula Radcliffe to have made a low-key return to athletics. An obscure road race perhaps, or some foray into the cross-country circuit might have been assumed to have been the wise route to rehabilitation.

Instead, amid a glare of international media attention and television coverage, she has chosen to gamble her reputation on a high profile return in Sunday's New York marathon. Admittedly, she will be rewarded handsomely - to the tune of half a million dollars (£272,000), according to some reports - but there will be no shortage of observers who will question Radcliffe's wisdom and suggest she should have taken a little longer to return, when the trauma of Athens had begun to represent a less damaging and hurtful wound to her self-esteem.

From my position in the commentary box at the Olympics, one of the aspects of Radcliffe's defeat I found shocking was the split in public opinion over her failure to win a marathon medal followed by a forlorn and ill-conceived attempt to run in the 10,000 metres that seemed to do little other than compound her misery. Seemingly, for every message of support for the athlete who had performed so brilliantly in the two years before the games, there were those who were only too ready to brand her a quitter, or a prima donna who would walk away from a race rather than take the licks of defeat.

How anybody who has broken the world record for the marathon in Chicago and in London, won European and Commonwealth gold medals on the track, and has been such an articulate opponent of the use of drugs in sport could somehow be vilified by so many people so quickly is one sporting mystery I cannot begin to understand.

As a nation, perhaps we were over the top in hailing her successes. But it seemed scarcely believable to me that so many could be so savagely unforgiving in her moment of defeat, apparently preferring instead the old image of the plucky loser. Her massive personal disappointment led her to seek consolation with her family before travelling to Flagstaff, Arizona, with her husband Gary, where, she says, her training has gone so well that she feels she is ready to make this surprise return to competitive running.

"I was taking my time, letting my body recover from the trauma that it has been through," Radcliffe said yesterday in a radio interview. "Then it was a matter of getting back into normal training and building it up from there. [In Flagstaff] I just settled into a pattern of doing how much I felt like doing, with no pressure.

"The first time I went out for a run, after taking time off, I thought, 'Yes, this feels like me. I'm definitely on the road to recovery'. It has been a lot of fun, and that's what I'm going to New York for. It's a race I've always wanted to run and I feel I can do it. I thought, 'why not?' if it's what I want to do and it will make me happy."

Radcliffe was originally invited as a guest to New York, but emphasises she would not have taken the subsequent decision to run if she did not feel she could do herself justice. Of course, with that statement being set against the standards she has achieved in the sport, she immediately puts herself under pressure once more to emerge victorious from Sunday's race.

According to Radcliffe, the reason for her Athens defeat was medical. She was suffering from the effects of a stomach disorder caused by the anti-inflammatories prescribed to cure an injury to her thigh muscle that developed only in the fortnight before the Olympic marathon. "If it hadn't been the Olympic Games, I would have called it off before the start," Radcliffe has said. "You wouldn't go to the line in that condition, not having had a cortisone injection the week before. But it was the Olympics. Maybe it became a little bit too big and I couldn't handle the possibility that it was going to be taken away from me, I was too stressed."

But now the moment has come when she will have to confront her personal demons once more, and she will know only when the race is under way whether the attempted rehabilitation has come too soon. Only then will she know if she is capable, psychologically, of being the athlete she was before Mizuki Noguchi consigned her Olympic dreams to history in a race celebrated so enthusiastically in Japan while Britain wrongly looked at Radcliffe's failure as some kind of national disaster.

"It's not totally about winning," Radcliffe said, not altogether convincingly. "It's doing the best you can that matters. It's giving the best of yourself. You have to remember that it's my sport and, underneath it all, it's my hobby and it's what I enjoy doing. It was very traumatic, and it almost destroys you at the time, but that's what sport's all about. It trades off against all the good times and how much you enjoy running."

Perhaps, Radcliffe has now put her Olympic defeat in its proper context. Hard as it might seem, and maybe she will never totally believe it, it was just a race, and New York is simply the next test in her outstanding athletics career. Hopefully it will be fun for her because I fear another defeat might be hard to take.