Athletics: Radcliffe eyes finale to shake the world

Nothing, it seems, can stop Paula Radcliffe these days. In Munich two months ago she won the European Championship 10,000m title in what turned out to be a race against the clock then stepped off the track and breezed through a series of television interviews in German and French without breaking verbal stride.

She even talked to the BBC in fluent English, which is more than could be said of some of England's football heroes in the wake of their 5-1 win in the the same stadium nine months previously.

The fluency of high-tempo speed endurance Radcliffe has found in 2002 has taken her to a second world cross-country crown, a debut marathon win in a European best time, a Commonwealth 5,000m gold medal in a Commonwealth record time and a European 10,000m title in another European record time.

It has also taken the 28-year-old Bedfordshire woman to heights unparalleled by any British athlete at world level. Not even Sebastian Coe, Steve Cram and Steve Ovett at the peak of their middle-distance powers ever finished a year sitting individually on top of the world rankings in three different events at championship-standard distances.

Radcliffe has run the fastest times in the world this year at 5,000m (the 14min 31.42sec she clocked at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in July), 10,000m (the 30min 01.09sec she recorded in the rain at the European Championships in Munich in August) and the marathon (the 2hr 18min 56sec it took her to win the London Marathon in April).

Just a year ago, having been squeezed out of the medal frame in the 10,000m final at the World Championships in Edmonton, Radcliffe was still regarded as the eternal British also-ran on the global running stage. Now the woman long-perceived as possessing the flaw of a lack of basic speed is vying with the fastest woman on the planet for the title of world female athlete of the year.

Unlike Marion Jones, Radcliffe is not unbeaten in 2002, but her successes have been of greater substance than those of the American sprinter and have been achieved across a considerably broader spectrum.

Even in her one defeat, behind Gabriela Szabo's European record 8min 21.42sec 3,000m run in Monte Carlo in July, the Briton succeeded in improving her best time for the distance by 4.77sec, with a Commonwealth record of 8:22.20 – 0.42sec faster than the long-standing world record Tatyana Kazankina held before the advance of "Ma's Army", the Chinese women who, according to their coach, Ma Junren, were fuelled by a cocktail of turtle blood and a brutal training regime that clocked up a marathon a day.

Jones, for all her domination of the women's sprinting scene these past five years, has never come close to Florence Griffith-Joyner's world records. Radcliffe was just nine seconds shy of Catherine Ndereba's marathon world best when she made her first venture at the classic 26 miles 385 yards distance in London six months ago.

In Chicago a week today, Ndereba and her time could be blown away by the British whirlwind on the streets of the Windy City.

It was on the flat, fast Chicago Marathon course a year ago that the Kenyan Ndereba, towed from the start by the men around her in a mixed-sex race, recorded her 2hr 18min 47sec, a 59sec improvement on the historic sub-2hr 20min time Naoko Takahashi, the Olympic champion from Japan, had achieved in Berlin just seven days previously.

Radcliffe clocked 2:18:56 on a London course full of tight twists and turns, running the last 14 miles on her own in a race which sets off the élite women half-an-hour ahead of the men. David Bedford, race director of the Flora London Marathon, reckons Radcliffe would have run "between 2:16:30 and 2:17:30" if she had raced with the men's field in the English capital.

And, according to the Mercier Nonogram, a table which equates running performances at different distances, the times Radcliffe recorded for 5,000m and 10,000m this summer are on precisely the same level as a 2hr 16min marathon.

Whether the new leading lady of world athletics will produce a 2hr 16min marathon remains to be seen, though if she managed to do so in Chicago the 2:15 barrier would suddenly be on the horizon, just 53 weeks after the 2:20 mark was breached by a woman for the first time.

Jim Peters was the first man to break 2:20, in the Polytechnic Harriers' Windsor to Chiswick race in 1953. He improved to 2:17:39 in the 1954 "Poly" marathon and probably would have proceeded to become the first marathon runner to beat 2:15 had he not pushed himself too hard in the Vancouver sun at the Empire Games later that year.

That is the one big fear the running world has for Radcliffe: that she might just push herself too far as she prepares to pass the best time of Peters the great, the Southend optician who took marathon racing to new limits in his worn-down Woolworth plimsolls. It is a danger of which Radcliffe happens to be acutely aware. "It does happen," she said. "You can push too hard. It happened to me in 1998. I pushed myself too far in training and came down with a virus.

"You are on a very fine line. You have to always push it a little bit, to see what you can do, but try not to push it too far. It is a risk the whole of the time. But if you don't take the risk you're not going to get the reward."

The rewards awaiting Radcliffe for pushing herself into world record territory in Chicago are manifold. For a start, there is the £96,000 bonus being offered by LaSalle Bank, the race sponsor, plus the equally sizeable dividend Radcliffe could expect from her kit sponsor, Nike. Then there is the kudos.

A 2hr 16min marathon would be 5min 11sec miling pace for a woman who has already run 5,000m at 4:40 pace and 10,000m at 4:50 pace. It happens to be a pace that just one British marathon runner has managed to better so far this year.

Mark Steinle, who will also be on the start-line in Chicago a week today, clocked 2hr 9min 17sec in London. Only the best of the men, evidently, are capable of stopping Paula Radcliffe now.