Now this is what I call an inspiring story. The frankness and realism
beats that third rate UK badminton player who said he (if selected,
HAH) would boycott the Beijing Olympics because of human rights.
Marathon woman
She crashed out in Athens but made a spectacular return after giving
birth. Now Paula Radcliffe is headed for Beijing and desperate for
Olympic gold. By Aida Edemariam
"
"
o Aida Edemariam
o The Guardian,
o Saturday May 10 2008
o
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/may/10/olympicgames2008.athletics
Marathon world record holder Paula Radcliffe. Photograph: Felix Clay
The surprise, really, is that she was even vaguely surprised. I want
to know not where her speed comes from, but her endurance: the will to
keep running for 26.2 miles, through pain barrier after pain barrier,
to world records. She says she gets it from her grandmother, has
always been extremely determined - and then: "I can see it in my
daughter, as well. Oh she's so determined. Like, if she's trying to
get to something, say, and there's an obstacle in the way, she'll just
climb over it, rather than taking the long way round, even if it's
easier. And if she sees something she wants, she just keeps on and on
and on until she gets it. And I say, 'God, where does she get being so
determined about stuff,' and my husband just looks at me and says, 'I
wonder'." She laughs, fondly.
Even when she's not laughing Paula Radcliffe has a happy voice, quick
sentences strung on a smile; interviewers who met her before her
daughter Isla's birth, just over a year ago, suggest some of this is
new, but it seems too much part of her to be entirely so. What has
always been true, and is striking still, is her lack of
self-importance or side, her friendly, accommodating directness -
though it is tinged, now, with a quiet sense of justification.
Because it's not that long since Radcliffe was - well, not written off
exactly (nothing could diminish her 2003 marathon world record of 2hr
15min 25sec, which some predict could stand for 100 years) - but
relegated to the ranks of those athletes who inspired overweening
hope, then were punished for disappointing. She may have run three of
the four fastest marathons in history and been sports personality of
the year in 2002, but when, three miles before the end of the Athens
Olympic marathon, she stopped, the adulation turned to vitriol. She
did win in New York, 10 weeks later, and then London the next year,
but acclaim for that was tempered by mockery for a very public toilet
break on the way. And then she got pregnant and was away for two years
- and people assumed she probably wouldn't come back, or at least not
at the same level. That was until New York last autumn, where,
chanting "I love you Isla, I love you Isla," to herself, she surged
past Gete Wami of Ethiopia in the last minutes, winning by 23 seconds.
Did she chant that all the way? It is both a moving and a sickly sweet
image. "No, not all the way through," she answers, as if I'm a little
mad. "Just right at the end, because I find that when you're trying to
change pace at the end of a marathon - people say it's a sprint, but
it's not really a sprint - it's about ... you kind of have to train to
do it, but it's about being able to change the pace, because if you
run that far your legs are kind of stuck. And I find it helps me at
that point to just repeat something. Sometimes I just count
one-two-three-four, just to move things. And Isla just fitted in quite
well at that point."
She had a 27-hour labour, and it is pat to suggest that a marathon
would seem easy after that. Recent pregnancy is thought to improve the
performance of female athletes too, but again Radcliffe frustrates
assumptions. Physiologically there is evidence to support this for
three to four months after birth the mother can have more red blood
cells ("a little bit like doing altitude training then coming back")
but Radcliffe didn't get any of the benefit because the labour damaged
a bone at the base of her spine and for months she could only swim and
cross-train. If there is an effect, she says, it's because it "makes
you stronger, and I think it makes you happier".
Counter-intuitively, it was partly her fitness that made childbirth
difficult: 26 years of training, including running through the
pregnancy, had tightened her muscles so much that they wouldn't
release her baby. "She just kept getting blocked and stopped. The only
painful bit was the last bit, which I'm sure is the same for most
women. But it just went on a long time and was frustrating." That and
an extremely narrow pelvis. "They measure it in three different
places, but my final pelvic gap was 10.1cm, and Isla's head was 10.3,
so that was never going to happen without a bit of help ..." Radcliffe
talks about her body with extraordinary frankness. It is her tool, and
she spends every day honing it. Squeamishness doesn't enter into it,
and while she apologised for not making her way to a Portaloo in that
infamous London marathon (instead she squatted, and yanked the gusset
of her knickers to one side), there was a sense that she couldn't
quite see what the fuss was about.
Everything and - until Isla - it seems everyone in her life partakes
in that will to be best, and her husband Gary Lough has sometimes
seemed to partake too much. One journalist even accused him of "living
his life through [his wife] in the dangerous manner of a pushy
parent". Lough, whom she met at Loughborough university, was a runner
himself until injury ended his international career at 27, and "he
made the decision to retire and help me with my training and support -
which is a hard thing to do. It's hard to have something you love
taken away, and still immerse yourself in that sport, seeing somebody
you're close to still go out there. I'm not sure I could have handled
that."
All the criticism must have an impact on your relationship? "It's hard
when you love someone and you know how they are really, and you see
how they're portrayed - that really hurts me. And I think he's very
much 'It doesn't matter, I don't care'. And I try and say, 'Well look,
I do care'." She is amazed that anyone should be surprised how good he
is with Isla, but knows she's lucky. "If he wasn't that I couldn't
come back to running."
It will be her fourth Olympics in Beijing (she narrowly missed medals
at 5,000m and 10,000m before her Athens marathon trauma), and, she
says, "I think I'm due a bit of luck!" She's training at altitude, in
humidity rooms, swallowing small thermometers to track her core
temperature - but she knows well that anything can go wrong, at any
point, and make it all for nought. In Athens it was anti-inflammatory
drugs, which altered her body's ability to absorb food. She's 34 now
and when these things happen she thinks, "Oh my God, I haven't got
that much time left, I don't want to lose it to this!"
That's one of the reasons why a mild question about China's human
rights record elicits a sudden fierceness. I thought she might dodge
this one, obey some invisible diktat from Olympic organisers not to
get involved. But that wouldn't be her style. "All boycotts do is harm
the athletes. Because it takes away their chance to compete in the
Olympics. They didn't have a choice in choosing where that Olympic
games was going to be held. But some people might only get to go to
one Olympics and they get that taken away from them.
"Boycotts actually never solved any of the problems they were supposed
to. I think if you want to go that route then it's more down to
governments, economic sanctions, don't buy things that are made in
China, that kind of thing. I do think that the Chinese human rights
record leaves a lot to be desired and needs attention drawn to it, and
in a way the Olympics are doing that."
I mention the torch, and Tibet - and she's off again. "I do think that
the issues in Tibet needed raising, and needed attention drawn to
them. But attacking the Olympic flame in that way I think was wrong,
because the Olympic flame symbolises way more than the Beijing
Olympics. It's about the whole spirit of the Olympics. It's about
every child's right to play, to go out and do sport. It's about
competing fairly, to go out and try as hard as you can and see the
fair results of that - it's all about the spirit of that and the ethos
of that, and I think that trying to put out that flame is about trying
to put out that spirit, and that should never be put out."
ยท Paula Radcliffe is ambassador for Tesco Sport for Schools & Clubs,
and she joins Tesco in their seventh year supporting Cancer Research
UK's Race for life.
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