Whenever Paula needs a break from poisonous spiders, stomach cramps, mid-race pitstops, kerbside tears, stress fractures and the mad recriminations of her husband-coach, all she has to do is buy a ticket to New York in the fall. In New York she is queen: in New York she is serene. No wonder she loves the place.

Paula Radcliffe runs the New York City Marathon tomorrow. She has run there and won there three times, twice finding redemption after the latest Olympic disaster. Something about the place works for her: her odd combination of Patient Griselda and warrior-princess seems to be just what the mad and glorious city requires.

She hasn’t run a marathon for 12 months, but the most recent episode of the Perils of Paula has been set aside for the regular New York remission. It is here she finds the best of herself: not just in fast times but also in gruelling one-on-one encounters, in races when the endgame becomes a battle and Radcliffe leans on the pace just as she hits the toughest sections of the course.

Let us hope that, as usual, she sets the difficulties of life aside as she runs through the five boroughs. The 35-year-old still has an awfully long way to run, because her finishing line lies in 2012 — assuming we can all stand the emotional stresses of it all.

Tomkins can weaken Australian brawn

When England, or for that matter Great Britain, play Australia at rugby league, you expect to see Our Boys taught a hard and wounding lesson about the nature of sport. Australia’s serial excellence in this sport of limited international opportunity is one of its established truths, even though they failed to have it their own way against a magnificent New Zealand defence last weekend.

However, the Aussies will now be warmed up and acclimatised, properly, and they will be as ready as they can be when they take on England in the Gillette Four Nations tournament at the DW Stadium today. The previous time there was a ghost of optimism about England’s chances, England lost 52-4 in Melbourne at the World Cup last November.

But there might be something to savour, all the same. It comes in England’s daring selection of Sam Tomkins at scrum half. Tomkins is 20, with fast feet and a maverick mind, and he has the potential to become one of the game’s great playmakers from the ancient Wigan tradition. He is the sort to make up a new game plan as he goes along, and it will be instructive to watch what he can do against the destructive might of Australia. He might just be the future — or even the present.

Win at all costs attitude must be savoured

Britain may have given up ruling the waves, but when it comes to the great banked wooden O of a Velodrome, British riders have been close to unbeatable. This glorious example of niche-excellence should continue this weekend at the UCI Track World Cup Classic event at Manchester Velodrome, which is the structure at the heart of all this bewildering British brilliance.

“Manchester is massive,” says Shane Sutton, the performance director, and this is not a remark about urban sprawl but about the importance of the event. As with all the heartland Olympic sports, this is not so much a discrete event as a part of the build-up to the still-three-years-off climax.

So out comes Sir Chris Hoy, the Redgrave of the push-bike and the fireman’s helmet with his three gold medals at the Olympics in Beijing, and out comes Rebecca Romero, another golden star from last year’s Games and perhaps the only person in Britain who can match Hoy for intensity.

This culture of brilliance at all costs is one of the greatest — and strangest — things that ever happened in British sport: it is worth savouring at every possible opportunity.