Athletics: Paula's return is guilt-edged

The final Golden League meeting of the season and still no gold for Great Britain. Indeed, no British athlete finished in the first three in any event in the Ivo Van Damme Memorial in Brussels on Friday night. It promises to be different from today, though. The British golden girl is back.

Five months after her world best performance in the London Marathon, Paula Radcliffe returns to action in the Nike London 10km road race in Richmond Park. The shin problem and the bronchitis that left her too short of fitness to contest the 10,000m at the World Championships in Paris have not deprived her of her Midas touch - or so she firmly believes.

Asked on Thursday night whether she was capable of raising the trailblazing standards she has set for women's distance running these past 18 months, Radcliffe replied: "I definitely can. That is why I have been so frustrated this year. Having improved my marathon time in London, I knew that I was capable of running under 30 minutes for 10,000m."

Only one woman has broken the half-hour mark for the distance, the Chinese athlete Wang Juxia, whose world record, 29min 31.70sec, dates back to 1993.

Radcliffe ran a solo 30:01.09 in winning the European 10,000m title in Munich last summer, but the Ethiopian Berhane Adere was only 3.09sec slower en route to the world title in Paris a fortnight ago, finishing with a high-speed flourish which suggested that a British victory might not have been a foregone conclusion.

As it was, Radcliffe sat watching the race on television with a mixture of frustration and guilt. "When you're down, you do feel guilty about a lot of things," she reflected. "You feel guilty about not being able to be there, and you feel guilty about the criticisms of the British team.

"I felt that, 'Here's the team being slagged off while they are out there doing their best, and I'm sitting here and I can't even do my bit'. I also felt guilty because so many people had worked hard to get me fit. Paris was my main goal this year and it really broke my heart not to get there.

"I knew the other girls would be in 30-minute shape. That's why I knew that, even if I had been in decent shape, I really needed to be in top shape to go there and run the race the way I would have needed to. I knew that I would have had to run sub-30 to win, and that unless I was in that sort of shape there wasn't any point going."

Two weeks later, the Bedfordshire woman is presumably closer to that shape - otherwise she would not be putting her elevated reputation on the line, even in a low-key road race.

Last year, in the wake of her Munich victory, she won the Nike event in 30min 38sec, a British road best. Already, though, Radcliffe is looking to the future.

Next week she runs in the Flora Light Challenge 5km road race in Hyde Park. She also has the Great North Run and the world half-marathon championships under consideration for next month. Beyond that, the lure of challenging for Olympic gold is on the horizon - more likely than not on the original marathon course.

"I feel that I definitely hold more cards in the marathon," Radcliffe said. "That doesn't mean I don't believe I could win the 10,000m, but I have got more going for me in the marathon. And also the Olympic marathon is going to be very special next year - going from Marathon to Athens, the way it is supposed to be run."