Athletics: Radcliffe's Story So Far May Be Final Proof of Mistaken Priorities

As Paula Radcliffe prepares to make her return to competition in London next month, she is also checking through the final proofs of her autobiography. And she had better get a sprint on, because My Story So Far, as the ghost-written work is subtitled, is due to appear in the bookshops on November 1.

That subtitle, of course, tells a tale of its own. Had things gone differently in an Athenian suburb on the evening of August 22, it might have read The Road to Golden Glory, or some such. Now, quite understandably, Radcliffe wants us to infer that the sad conclusion of her attempt to win the Oympic marathon title does not represent the end of her career.

Although she remains what she always was, the most natural and unspoilt of people, she now stands at the centre of a web of commercial interests, of which her autobiography represents a single strand. Another is the commitment to make her comeback on November 28 in the Nike 10km; the familiar swoosh of her personal sponsor is prominent in the main picture on the jacket of her book.

If it seems a little sad that her return to public life should be so explicitly linked to the income streams that have turned her into a millionaire, then that is the reality of modern sport. What will never be known is the extent to which the pressure applied by business arrangements affected the events in Athens two months ago.

Arguments are still simmering over Radcliffe's decision to abandon the Olympic marathon with less than four miles to go, and over her equally unsuccessful attempt to finish the 10,000 metres five days later. No doubt the book will provide more clues to her thinking than she provided during her tearful press conference on the day after the first of those very public disasters.

A couple of weeks ago she went into some detail about the reasons behind her failure in the marathon. She listed the problems she had encountered during her final preparations, including a minor calf strain that turned into something more serious, and the damaging effects of the anti-inflammatory drugs she took. An upset stomach, dizzy spells and sleepless nights were obviously unhelpful factors as she neared the biggest night of her competitive life.

During the race itself, she wrote, the consequences became apparent. Stomach problems began at the 10km mark, and her legs felt strangely weak. "My brain was doing all the right things," she remembered, "but my body seemed unable to respond."

Tests later proved that dehydration was not the cause. Mostly likely, she thought, the effort to overcome the pre-race setbacks meant that, in effect, she had run her marathon before she arrived at the start line. From the time she set off, she was running on empty.

So far, however, she has said nothing illuminating about her mental state during the race. Some of us felt that the causes were as much mental as physical: so heightened were the stakes that, when the third runner went past and it became apparent that she was not going to win a medal, she could not cope with the implications.

Among those, inevitably, are the commercial considerations, not least those surrounding her autobiography. The phenomenal sales of 350,000 copies of Martin Johnson's autobiography in the weeks following England's triumph in the Rugby World Cup last year established the public's appetite for a story of patriotic success, and no doubt that was the sort of thing Radcliffe's publisher, Simon & Schuster, had in mind when it agreed to pay her a reported £300,000 to tell her tale. Now you might expect it to be facing a rather different set of expectations.

"Funnily enough, they haven't changed," Andrew Gordon, the firm's editorial director, said yesterday. "We were obviously disappointed that it didn't work out as everyone would have liked. But when we talked to the book trade after Athens, we found that not a single order had gone down and one or two might even have gone up."

The publisher is sticking by its original intention to print 100,000 copies, in the belief that the public's interest in Radcliffe transcends the boundaries of sport.

"It might be that strange British thing," Gordon mused. Did he mean the obsession with glorious failures? "There may be an element of that."

When he added that he hoped she would be writing another book in due course, he meant one that reached its climax in success rather than failure. Few would disagree. But if a significant lesson has emerged from Paula Radcliffe's experience in Athens, it might be on the question of priorities. First take care of the real business. Then make the deals.