While the bloggers wield their handbags and brandish Paula Radcliffe everything from a failure to a drama queen, the blood, sweat and tears of the Olympic marathon proved why she is an all-time sporting great. Radcliffe finished in 23rd place, in tears and on one leg, and then waited on the track to hug her old friend, Liz Yelling, who had fallen, sustained a suspected broken rib and ended up cut and bruised. It was the hardest marathon of all.

Some people have it in for Radcliffe. They think she is too self-pitying, self-absorbed and even selfish, but if we had a bit more of those qualities then Great Britain might be confident of not exiting these Olympics with its worst medal haul in athletics since Brendan Foster prevented a whitewash in Montreal with his bronze.

The question now is was it a gamble worth taking? The answer came from Mara Yamauchi, who finished sixth and so matched Cilla Welch's best finish in an Olympic marathon by a British woman from 1984. “The last time I saw her was well after halfway and she looked great,” Yamauchi said. “But she told me her leg went at about 3km. I saw Liz go down horribly too and the whole of her side was red and grazed so she was really brave to dig in.”

So Radcliffe looked fine and was hanging in with the leaders, but the trouble had set in with barely a mile gone.

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Afterwards, she revealed that she had actually started running outdoors only a fortnight ago. When she stopped with 5km to go, you feared the worst. She was actually stretching her calf, though, because she had a pain coming from her foot. “Earlier in the race I thought that someone was kicking my foot but I looked around and they weren't. Then my calf started hurting and my back as well,” she said. She admitted that she would have walked to the finish this time. “It would probably have been better and less painful,” she said. “I hope I haven't made the old injury worse because that means I can come back. I don't want longer off.”

There may have been a degree of recklessness in her decision, but as she said, it was a gamble. If she felt there was even a 10 per cent chance of winning this race, it was surely worth taking. “It wasn't sharp pain, it was just like running on one leg,” she said. “The worst bit was the hairpin coming into the stadium. That really hurt.” She cried at the end and she cried in the mixed zone when asked what had happened. She cried because she cares and, given this is already looking like being a barren Olympics for British athletics, it is a shame a few more do not care as much.

Will she have done more damage? Only time will tell. It is only three months that she suffered the low-grade stress fracture of her left femur and she was told that it would be impossible to make it. She proved those medics wrong as, for many, her placing would have been a happy return. Her time was 2hr 32min 38sec, almost 11 minutes down on her last marathon in New York, was pure courage in the face of a body that was screaming no. The same goes for Yelling's 26th.

That Constantina Tomescu-Dita, of Romania, won the race in a time of 2:26:44 will also comfort her. Not only will Radcliffe be the same age in London, 38, but she will have fewer miles under her belt. Radcliffe has run ten marathons - this was the first one she failed to win when finishing - whereas Tomescu-Dita has run 24.

Mary Wittenberg, race director of the New York Marathon, said it was an “astonishing” run and, having spoken to Radcliffe after the race, did not rule out a comeback in the Big Apple on November 2. “She's going to be badly beaten up, though, because it was truly unbelievable,” Wittenberg said. “To do that on the back of five days' running before she got to the training camp is something I don't think anybody else could have done.”

Tomescu-Dita's run was brave in a different way, breaking away at 20km after receiving instructions from her husband, who was following on a bicycle. Nobody got close. Yamauchi stayed with the pack until the last stages when it became a battle between Catherine Ndereba, of Kenya, and Zhou Chunxiu, of China, for the other medals. Ndereba finally broke away with 30 metres to go. Wittenberg pointed out that Radcliffe beat the best American with one leg. Imagine what she could do if she makes an Olympics with two.