http://sport.guardian.co.uk/athletics/story/0,10082,1458387,00.html
Duncan Mackay Wednesday April 13, 2005 The Guardian Paula Radcliffe can become the first female athlete in history to earn $1m (£530,000) for a single day's work if she wins the Flora London Marathon on Sunday - and she will not even have to run as fast as she has before to collect the money. Race officials said last night that they would pay Radcliffe a world-record bonus of $125,000 even if she finished as much as three minutes outside the time she ran there in 2003. The situation has arisen because the 31-year-old will not receive help from male pacemakers, as she did two years ago when she ran 2hr 15min 25sec, a time no other woman has come close to. Instead she will compete in a race against only the other female runners, so the race director David Bedford has decreed the time she will be aiming for is the "women's only world record" of 2:18.56 she set on her debut at the distance in London in 2002. Nevertheless Radcliffe will not complain if she collects a total of $255,000 in published prize money and bonuses for running the slower time to add to the reported $500,000 she is receiving just to run. She will probably earn at least another $250,000 in unpublished bonuses from the London Marathon and other sponsors. Yesterday she refused to entertain suggestions that she would never again scale the peaks. It is a question that will not go away and Liz McColgan, whom she succeeded as Britain's greatest female distance runner, had said it in print this week. McColgan, the 1996 London winner, maintained in a Sunday newspaper that Radcliffe made too many excuses when she did not win and ran in too many big-city marathons, which the Scot said did not really matter. Radcliffe said: "Liz is someone I look up to and I don't want to get into a slagging match. She hasn't spoken to me since this time last year and if she was genuinely concerned I'm sure she would have contacted me." Asked yesterday about the view of Rob de Castella, the Australian who won the world title in 1983, that runners have a maximum of four really top-class marathons in them, Radcliffe said: "I don't think that, although I can't put a number on it. That changes from person to person." London will be her sixth marathon and she has twice broken the world record and set three of the four fastest times in history. ENDS
