Athletics: Menendez the cross-country race walker

With a name like Niobe Menendez, the athlete wearing No 453 in the opening event on the track in the European trials meeting yesterday might have been racing for a place in the Spanish team rather than the British squad that is being finalised in Birmingham this weekend.

In fact, the women's 5km walk does not appear on the programme at the European Championships in Munich next month. The race yesterday was purely for a AAA title. For some in the field, it was also a chance to sharpen up for the Commonwealth Games, which opens on Thursday week. Menendez was one of them. Not that she did much sharpening. After 50m she stepped off the track, suffering from a bowel problem. "I just couldn't walk properly," she said, "but I'm sure I'll be all right for the Games."

In those Games in Manchester Menendez will be competing in the 20km walk as an English athlete. "I am English," she said. "I was born in London. My mother's British. My father, Luis, is Spanish. He's from Gijon. I have lived there, and in France."

Menendez, as it happens, has never even considered representing the land of her father. "Not really," she said, "having only lived there for two years, when I was in primary school. It always intrigues me that people take such an interest in my background. It's just normal to me. Most people are mongrel these days. No one's a thoroughbred."

But no one else in England's Commonwealth Games team has a Spanish surname – or the first name of a Greek goddess, for that matter. In Greek mythology, Niobe was petrified in a permanent state of tears by Zeus, grieving for the slaying of her 12 children. "Like Niobe, all tears," Hamlet says of his mother's bearing at his father's funeral. Not that Niobe Menendez was flooding tears yesterday, despite her highly premature exit. "Better that it happened here rather than in Manchester," she said, as she stood at trackside watching her Commonwealth Games team-mate Lisa Kehler stroll to victory in 21min 42.53sec, a new British record.

At 35, Menendez is a rising star of the race-walking world – less than five years after seriously taking up the challenge of what has long been regarded as the twilight discipline of track and field. "I was actually a 1500m and 3,000m runner at school and with Croydon Harriers," she said. "I did a bit of race walking to fill in for the league matches, but I did all of the events to help out. I did finish fifth and sixth in the walk at the English Schools' Championships, but I never did any training. It wasn't until I was 31 that I started training for it."

Her first success came four years ago when she was picked to represent Ireland in the Dublin Grand Prix event. "I qualified because I lived there for five years and after five years you're eligible," Menendez said. "I came back to Britain the next year and have stayed here. It was never an issue that I could compete for Britain."

Menendez has competed for Britain with increasing distinction ever since. In May she won the world veterans' 10km title at Riccione in Italy, finishing eight minutes clear of her closest rival – and beating all of the men in the field.

For the time being at least, Menendez has settled on the south coast, at Poole. She's a student midwife at the University of Bournemouth but also works as an interpreter. A member of Steyning Athletics Club, her athletics career has been guided for the past two years by Martin Rush, a former international race walker and now a leading coach.

If ever a race walker gave credibility to the standard of athletic excellence required for the event it was Rush. Back in 1989 he ran in one of Britain's leading 10-mile races, the annual Brampton to Carlisle event, and won in 49min 06sec, beating the Olympic marathon bronze medallist Charlie Spedding. When the stunned Spedding was informed he had been beaten by a race walker, he replied, with reference to the walking rule of having to maintain unbroken contact with the ground: "Well, he was definitely 'lifting' today."