Kate Reed, a 10,000metres runner from Clevedon, in Somerset, revealed last night that her Olympic hopes had been skewered by some extraordinarily unusual management by Dave Collins, the UK Athletics performance director, who made her run a two kilometre time-trial the evening before her race.

Reed, 25, finished 23rd in the 10,000 metres yesterday, 2 minutes behind the Olympic record time set by Tirunesh Dibaba, of Ethiopia. She explained afterwards that she had “nothing” in her legs and that a big reason for this was that Collins had spent the day before threatening to withdraw her from the competition, then making her run an impromptu 2,000 metres.

She was told that she had to run it at race pace and while other competitors such as Jo Pavey, her Great Britain team-mate, were at the warm-up track jogging gently and preparing in the traditional way, she was, she said: “Running my heart out, praying to God that I could get through it. To put someone through that the day before their first major international is absolutely appalling.”

Reed's problem was that a niggling injury from the Macau training camp had confounded the team doctors. She felt that she was fit to run but she said that Collins “wanted to make sure I wasn't going to let anyone down. He didn't want any bad performances.”

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Collins's apparent paranoia was such that at one stage on Thursday he had Reed booked on a flight home rather than let her compete. The “arguments” had started at 10am on Thursday, but the conclusion, to run two kilometres in Beijing's notorious humidity, seems only to have backfired.

“It was such an emotional day,” she said. “We got to 7.30 down on the track and my coach Alan Storey was, like: 'Just go out and show them.'

“Emotionally, I wasn't prepared for it. It's been a childhood dream to come to an Olympics. But this is not at all how I imagined it. I wanted to go home on Thursday, I was in shreds. If it hadn't been for Alan Storey and my mum and dad, who I was phoning back at home, I don't think I'd have made it through. I was an emotional wreck, shaking like a leaf.”

As it was, she was lapped nearly three times by Dibaba, although this was largely because of the pace of the race in which Dibaba broke the Olympic record and ran the second-fastest time ever behind the deeply questionable world record set by the Wang Yunxia, of China, 15 years ago.

For the last 1,500 metres, this was a classic head-to-head, with Dibaba sitting in behind Elvan Abeylesesse, the Ethiopia-born Turk. Dibaba sat calmly on her shoulder and made her searing break with 360 metres to go. Abeylesse just about stayed with her down the back straight, but when Dibaba came out of the bend, she had a 15metre cushion and was assured of victory. Pavey finished twelfth, more than a minute behind Dibaba, but despite running a personal best, she said that she was very disappointed.