Athletics: Radcliffe's dilemma on long road to Athens

It was the morning after the night before and Paula Radcliffe was pondering a big decision, probably the biggest decision she will have to make in the running life she started as an asthmatic 12-year-old in 299th place in the girls' race at the English cross-country championships. Having reduced the opposition in the European Championship 10,000m final on Tuesday night to little more than human rubble, the Bedfordshire bulldozer was left wondering whether to change direction in pursuit of her ultimate target.

For some time now the Radcliffe plan has been to chase Olympic gold in the marathon in Athens two years hence. But that blueprint was drawn up in the days when the leading lady of British running was an also-ran on the track – before her training for this year's London Marathon armed her with the powers of speed- endurance that blitzed her helpless rivals in the Commonwealth Games 5,000m final in Manchester two weeks ago and again in Munich on Tuesday night. Fourth in the Olympics in Sydney two years ago and in the World Championships in Edmonton last summer, the new-model Radcliffe now knows she could have a golden shot at the 10,000m instead in Athens.

"Yeah, it is going to be a big decision," she mused, sitting on a wooden bench in the shadow of the Olympiastadion's spiderweb glass roof. "I'm conscious of the fact that it will probably be my best shot at the Olympics and I have to make the right decision. In any other Olympics you would think, 'Yep, it's the track race that everybody remembers. It's the track race that you want to win'. But Athens is the home of the marathon, isn't it? And that makes it special."

It does indeed. And, having become something very special herself this year, how fitting it would be if Radcliffe were to discover her midas Olympic touch running in the footsteps of Spiridon Louis, the Greek shepherd who won the original marathon race in the first Olympics of the modern era in 1896, sustained on his way from Marathon to Athens by a bottle of red wine and an easter egg handed to him by his step-father.

Louis gained such fame his name entered the Greek language. "Egin Louis" means "to become Louis", to run quickly. Maybe one day "to Radcliffe" will become an English verb: to overcome, perhaps, or, given the burgeoning momentum the 28-year-old is gathering, to obliterate, even. In her high-speed wake in the Olympiastadion on Tuesday night, Radcliffe caused such a scene of devastation it cast the mind's eye back to 1982 and the famous photograph of Daley Thompson standing, hands on hips, at the end of the 1500m, the last event of the decathlon at the European Championships in Athens. Thompson had just won the gold medal and broken the world record. He had also broken his rivals. They lay strewn on the track around him.

Radcliffe chuckled when the analogy was put to her. "If it hadn't been so wet I would have been on the floor myself at the finish," she said. In the space of 30min 01.09sec, though (her finest half-an-hour, you could say), the pride of Bedford and County Athletics Club achieved the same effect in Munich on Tuesday night as Thompson did over the course of two days and 10 events in the Olympic Stadium in Athens 10 years ago. Radcliffe's nominal rivals were strung out all over the track behind her in varying degrees of distress. Sonia O'Sullivan was in a state of shock in the silver-medal position, wondering why she was running so fast yet was so far behind, and fearing she might suffer the ignominy of being lapped.

From lapped-land to Lapland, meanwhile, Lasse Viren was at his country cottage becoming increasingly frustrated with the Finnish television producers who kept switching to the men's shot put to follow the progress of Arsi Harju and Ville Tiisanoja. The winner of the only previous major championship 10,000m final held in the Olympiastadion was mightily impressed, though, with what he saw of Paula Radcliffe pounding in his historical spikemarks.

"It was a superb race that Paula ran," Viren reflected the following day. "She is a particularly brave athlete. She had the courage to make her race plan and stick to it. The same thing happened in the London Marathon in April. She has been able to show that Europeans, like the Africans, can not just win but also make truly great races."

The race Radcliffe made in the Olympiastadion on Tuesday was every bit as great as the one Viren did on the same Munich track in the 1972 Olympics. He tripped and fell but got up to win and break Ron Clarke's world record. Radcliffe could have survived a similar tumble and, to many observers, her winning time was, as the Suddeutsche Zeitung put it on Wednesday morning, "der echte weltrekord" – the genuine world record, dismissing the validity of the 29:31.78 the Chinese runner Wang Junxia achieved on a diet (or so her coach, Ma Junren, insisted) of brutal training and turtle blood.

What has fuelled Radcliffe to greater things this year has been the sustained fast-pace two-hour runs and the even faster one-hour blasts she has undertaken with the marathon in mind. It has taken the 299th-placed cross-country girl of 16 years ago into the territory of the all-time greats, being mentioned in the same breath as Viren and Thompson and also Emil Zatopek, whose winning time in the 1948 Olympic final was just a second faster than Radcliffe's winning run in Munich.

"It is a bit scary," Radcliffe suggested, pondering her new-found place in the great scheme of athletic things. "If you had said to me two years ago, 'You're going to run 30 minutes', I would have said, 'Yeah. Get out of it. No way'. But that's why I never set myself limits. If you do that, it's very difficult to go beyond those limits."

So forget about 2hr 18min 47sec, the world record limit thus far in the women's marathon. In the Windy City of Chicago on 13 October expect the Radcliffe whirlwind to blow it away.