PAULA RADCLIFFE admitted she had to swallow her pride and settle for achieving the Olympic qualifying time by finishing third in the BMW Berlin marathon yesterday.

While Kenya’s Patrick Makau won the men’s race in a new world record of two hours three minutes 38 seconds, his compatriot Florence Kiplagat won the women’s event in 2hrs 19mins 44secs, with Germany’s Irina Mikitenko second in 2:22.18.

Radcliffe was third in 2:23.46, more than seven minutes inside the Olympic ‘A’ standard of 2:31.00 but also more than eight minutes slower than her own world record, while Scott Overall also achieved the qualifying time when finishing a surprise fifth in the men’s race in 2:10.55 on his marathon debut.

“In some ways I am happy, in other ways I’m disappointed with third,” said Radcliffe, who was also third in her comeback race in London in May after 18 months out, a result she described as “a disaster”.

“It’s been a tough year and with everything I had to come through I should accept this and at least I have the Olympic qualifying time. I had to swallow my pride a little bit because I wanted to do better than that, but still it’s ticked off. Now I have to build on that for London.

“I’m not happy because I would have liked to run faster and win the race, but my main goal was to enjoy it and I kind of did.”