It is three months since Paula Radcliffe sat in a marquee in Battersea Park and said that she suspected there would be bumps along the way to Beijing. She got that right. Two weeks later, doctors told her that she had a fractured femur and it would be impossible for her to make the Olympic Games. Today, it seems that the marathon mum may well have achieved Mission Impossible.

Nobody is getting carried away, but reports emanating from the Radcliffe camp suggest that she will definitely be on the start line in Tiananmen Square for the Olympic marathon on August 17. After arriving in Macau to join up with some of the Team GB athletes today, Radcliffe faces 11 days of acclimatisation that will prove to her and her coach, husband Gary Lough, whether she is ready to complete a remarkable comeback.

Concerns that she might let emotion and her desire to make up for Athens, where injury and illness saw her succumb to a kerbside melodrama, cloud her judgment were dismissed by Dave Collins, the UK Athletics performance director. “The challenge she’s taken on is considerable and it’s important to make sure that challenge is not progressing at the expense of her long-term health,” he said.

The Radcliffe camp has been shrouded in secrecy since she revealed her “bombshell” in May. She had expected an MRI scan to give her the all-clear after a niggling hip problem, but, instead, found she had suffered a low-grade stress fracture of her left femur. “It’s like a jumbo jet getting up to cruising altitude,” she said at the

time. “Once it’s there, problems are less likely to happen, but I would not want to go to Beijing for the T-shirt. It’s going to go down to the wire and I need a bit of luck.”

Since then, Radcliffe has got her head down at her training base in Font Romeu, France, coming to the UK only for further tests at the Olympic Medical Institute in London. She has undergone weeks of work in the pool and has been running on a gravity-reducing treadmill. All has evidently gone well and the team reserve, Hayley Haining, said at the weekend: “If Paula is going to Macau, it seems like she will run.” The question nobody will answer is how much road work Radcliffe has managed. She will take early-morning runs on the golf course in Macau to gauge her fitness, while Team Radcliffe – Lough, her parents, daughter Isla and Gerard Hartmann, her physical therapist – will be on hand to offer their support.

Such a meticulous planner as Radcliffe may be alarmed to note that Olympic organisers have suggested they may move the marathon to another city if pollution fears are realised. “We have prepared a detailed contingency plan if there is extremely bad weather,” Liu Wenbin, the deputy director of the Beijing Organising Committee’s Sports Department, said. However, the weather and news that Irina Mikitenko, the London Marathon winner, has pulled out of the Olympics because of a foot injury, are unlikely to matter much to Radcliffe as she tries to combat her lack of mileage; even before her latest problem, a toe injury caused her “six weeks of interrupted training”.

Collins, however, is confident. “I am more optimistic as time goes on,” he said. “My crystal ball is not working very well, but as things positively progress, that’s good news.”

Also in confident mood is Simeon Williamson. The sprinter was anything but starry-eyed when asked how he felt now that Usain Bolt had confirmed he would run the 100 metres as well as the 200 metres. “Why would it perturb me?” he asked. “I am going there in good shape and in my head I want a medal and I’ll be disappointed if I don’t get one.” He accepted that he would have to dip beneath the ten-second barrier for the first time to achieve that aim and said confidence constituted about 70 per cent “of me”.

If Radcliffe can summon up a similar level by the end of the week, the impossible dream may still be on. Expect more bumps.

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