Triple World Champion marathon runner and English Athletics star Paula Radcliffe is preparing to compete at the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games after an emphatic race win at the San Silvestre Vallecana road race in Spain on New Year’s Eve.
The 10 kilometre race which attracted 10,000 competitors saw Ms Radcliffe hit in the mouth with a streamer mid-race and other competitors jostled as the races’ reputation for a party atmosphere was well and truly confirmed.
Despite this scare, Ms Radcliffe recovered to win the race in 31 minutes 16 seconds to confirm her status as the world’s premier long distance runner.
“It really was a good way to round off 2005,” said Ms Radcliffe who also added a fourth London Marathon title and third World Championship Marathon crown to her highly successful list of achievements in 2005.
“I wanted to have a hard race, but with the fiesta atmosphere a vital part of the meeting, it was never going to happen.”
Ms Radcliffe is not foreign to serious mid-race controversies, with her 2005 season nearly brought to a halt by a six-women collision at an IAAF meet in the USA.
“It was never on the scale of what happened there – that could have messed up my whole season,” commented Ms Radcliffe after the Spanish race on the seriousness of the collision in the USA.
Ms Radcliffe’s attention now shifts to 2006, in particular the Commonwealth Games.
“The Commonwealths are very important to me; I will be totally focussed on it during the next couple of months.”
The defending Commonwealth Champion in the Women’s 5000 metres, Ms Radcliffe is adding the 10,000 metres to her program in Melbourne and is expected to dominate.
Ms Radcliffe heads to the United States to optimise her preparation in the lead up to the Games and the London Marathon in which she is vying for her fifth title.
During the 2006 season, Ms Radcliffe hopes to break her Marathon world record of 2:15:25, which she says, “definitely it’s possible.”
“Things have to be perfect on the day, the conditions, the course. A couple of times since (setting the record) I’ve been in better training and shape than before the record.”
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