She will not allow it to end like this

She was on the floor then and she kept getting back up until she knocked out the best marathon runners in the world. Maybe her obituary writers should remember this as they suggest Radcliffe can never recover from a blow which left her quite hollow-eyed and unable to mutter-anything other than a one-word acknowledgment of her devastation.

Radcliffe will fight back, you can bet, because the sport has known few more courageous athletes. Today, she was still considering whether to make that comeback as early as Friday night when the 10,000m is run here.

As she explained today: "I don't know what I'm going to do because my plan was to come here, run the marathon, win the marathon and then decide after that. It's not a decision I'm going to make in the next 24 hours. Emotionally and physically, I need to give it a couple of days before I make that decision. Part of me wants to do it, but part of me does not want to put myself through it again."

It is a terrible dilemma for her. Personally, I hope any such urge would be resisted. The hell that Radcliffe went through so publicly yesterday, as the weight of a nation's hopes and of her own expectations seemed to eventually collapse on to her in an Athenian sauna, was enough agony to endure in one Games.

As she admitted today, mentally she is still trying to "pick up the pieces", still trying to figure what on earth went wrong out there. "It's still difficult for me. I'm still waiting for the results of the medical tests. I set off, didn't feel too bad and didn't feel the conditions were excessively bothering me. I'm just trying to work out what happened."

Hindsight is a wonderful thing but after watching yesterday's trauma unfold, Radcliffe, just as dominant in the longest track event these past couple of years as she has been on the roads, might have actually ended up being better off plumping for the 25-lap track event here in the first place.

It will be run late on Friday night and will not suffocate quite like the lottery of an early- evening marathon run on the hottest day of the Athens summer, with air temperatures about 35 degrees at the start and the heat steaming from the asphalt making it feel a good deal more oppressive than that.

Yet, in fairness, there can be no argument about Radcliffe's decision to go for the marathon. It is her event now, the one she has quite blitzed for three years. Yet however meticulously she had prepared, it became clear as we waited in the furnace that nothing could truly have geared a northern European athlete to cope with the ordeal ahead.

This is not making excuses for Radcliffe because the conditions were murderous for everyone and the victorious Mizuki Noguchi's run of 2hrs 26 min 20secs was a rare tour de force. Yet it was a scandal that the athletes were put through such an ordeal at this time of day.

PITTED against Noguchi, Kenya's Catherine Ndereba and Ethiopia's Alemu, though, Radcliffe faced a trio much more at home in such conditions. Her great pal Liz Yelling, a creditable 25th, mused afterwards: "Maybe she underestimated the course because it was awful. I went over the profile and there was supposed to be some flat spots - I didn't see any."

Yet, actually, there appeared to be nothing wrong with Radcliffe's familiar front-running tactics. It is just that when Noguchi made her devastating break at 25km, she knew she had to chase or watch the gold slip away. We won't forget Radcliffe's tears on that big screen yet maybe Paula still can. A few weeks after her Sydney trauma, she told me that she was more determined than ever to run faster, explaining: "I don't want my career to be defined by the image of 'that brave girl who's always going to be fourth or fifth but at least always tries hard'."

No, Radcliffe's career should be defined by something more positive than that. Her greatness as an athlete, to my mind, is not in question just because of what happened yesterday. Now she is telling us that greatness of spirit will surface once more too. Do not bet against her.