'Come on Paula': Radcliffe's London Marathon is final competitive race
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Version 0 of 1. It was her slowest-ever marathon – and she was beaten by a man dressed in a Spider-Man costume. But as Paula Radcliffe crossed the line in her final competitive race, for once winning was the last thing on her mind. “Especially down the last mile, I didn’t care about the time,” she admitted. “I was just so tired. And I wanted to thank as many people as possible.” A one-minute applause is standard as a sign of respect, but Radcliffe’s lasted two hours, 36 minutes and 55 seconds – the time it took her to drag her body around 26.2 miles. That time was 21 minutes and 30 seconds slower than her astonishing world marathon record, set in London in 2003, but she was still the first women’s club runner home. Radcliffe would have gone even faster if she had not spent so much time smiling, waving and applauding at the crowds; the athletic equivalent of a musician operating a one-man band. Even so, she was inside the 2hr 42min qualifying standard for the women’s marathon at next year’s Rio Olympics. Not that the 41-year-old Radcliffe is tempted. “I am always going to run, but now I will be a fun runner, which means I won’t have the pressure of trying to get my body ready for a race,” she said. In every one of her previous marathons, Radcliffe started with the elite runners. This time, the queen of distance running was in with the plebs. In the past she has always been a front runner, determined to push on alone. Now she found herself accompanied by a posse of club runners, proudly sporting vests such as Skegness Coasters and Milton Keynes CC, who swarmed around her like bouncers might pop royalty. She didn’t seem to mind, even when one Team Bath athlete with flying elbows nearly cut her off going round a sharp corner. Every other runner around her sported numbers on their vests. Radcliffe’s merely said “Paula”. And “Come on, Paula” was the incessant chant of the 750,000 spectators lining the streets of London, despite the cold and battleship grey skies. No wonder she nearly – in her words – “lost it” several times, particularly when she saw a big sign on the Embankment saying: “We are going to miss you”, and during those final steps around Birdcage Walk. Like thousands of others in the race, she had started too fast – after 12.5 miles she was running at 2hr 32m pace – and for the final few miles her smile was more a grimace. But she wasn’t going to stop for anyone, not even for the BBC’s Denise Lewis, who tried to grab her for an interview around Tower Bridge. In the final few metres, she joined hands with a club runner called Rob in homage to the first-ever London marathon in 1981, when the American Dick Beardsley and Norwegian Inge Simonsen crossed the line together. And then that was it. The curtain had come down on her career; now it was time for photographs with her husband, Gary, and her children, Isla and Raphael. It was at this point that Radcliffe found out she had been beaten by Spider-Man – the athlete Paul Martelletti, who broke the world record for the fastest marathon dressed as a superhero in two hours, 30 minutes and 12 seconds. “My son Rafael will think it’s great that Spider-Man has beaten Mummy,” she joked. Everyone else, though, was just grateful for a final glimpse of athletics’s wonder woman running into the sunset. |