Paula Radcliffe: Horror in Paris meant I had to clear myname on drugs
PAULA RADCLIFFE has revealed she was in Paris earlier this month when the terror attacks took place – and that the shocking experience made her all the more determined to clear her name over drug smears.
Speaking to The Mail on Sunday in her first interview since being cleared of doping allegations, the women’s marathon world recordholder told how she feared dying with a stain on her reputation.
The 41-year-old mother of two was visiting Disneyland Paris when the fanatics struck two weeks ago. She says: ‘It made me think that we could not be here tomorrow and I don’t want the last thing people remember about me to be drugs.’
In the interview, Radcliffe speaks exclusively about her ‘12 months of hell’ before last week being declared ‘ entirely innocent’ of doping allegations by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).
Of the Paris attacks, the athlete says: ‘It was very difficult. We had to explain to the children – the little one [Raphael] is only five so he didn’t really understand, but with Isla, who is eight, we had to explain what had happened.
‘This is after we’d already had to explain in the summer why we were so upset because there were bad people trying to write things that were not true about Mummy. Now there were bad people attacking the city.
‘It’s a difficult thing to tell a child, and it made me think, “We could not be here tomorrow” and I don’t want the last thing people remember about me to be that I was linked to drugs.’
Radcliffe says her name has been ‘dragged through the mud’ since the reports of highly abnormal blood tests by an unnamed ‘British athlete’ surfaced in a report by German broadcaster ARD last year. She offered to take a lie detector test to convince doubters, declaring: ‘I am innocent, I swear. I have never taken drugs.’
Holding back tears, she adds: ‘I feel as if part of who I am was taken away. If I’d been accused of cruelty to animals or money laundering, I’d be able to just brush it off, knowing it was wrong, but this goes to the heart of what I am about and everything that I’ve stood for in my career.’
Radcliffe was not named in the original television programme a year ago, but it was soon circulating in the media that her name was on a list, supposedly from inside the IAAF, that contained names of athletes who had allegedly given ‘suspicious’ samples. Then in August, it alleged that ‘a top British athlete’ had given three blood tests whose scores were so ‘abnormal’ that there was only a one-in-1,000 chance that they were natural.
But Radcliffe points out that the background of those tests was never taken into account. ‘You have to look at what was happening at the time,’ she says. ‘No one did that. They looked at the figures and came to the wrong conclusions.
‘There are lots of reasons why a figure could be high, but the main reason is altitude. A sample collected at altitude will have different values to one collected at sea level.
‘Or it could be because you’re ill. You could have been dehydrated when you took the test, or have drunk litres of water.
‘You have to fill in a form when you give a sample, and that form asks you lots of questions which provide context. You can’t analyse blood values and come to conclusions about them without it.’
She admits the last year has taken a toll: ‘I kept thinking that the truth has to come out, then Gary [her husband] said, “Yes, but people go to prison for things they didn’t do.” That was a low point. I’m an upbeat sort of person, but it’s been hard.’