As Paula Radcliffe bids goodbye to the London Marathon, here’s why her world records will stand the test of time

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The world’s best long distance runners have taken to the capital’s streets to compete in the London marathon, yet much of the nation’s attention will be focused not on the elite field, but in the masses of club athletes and in particular one 41-year-old who has recently been struggling with an achilles injury.

More on this story: Here's everything you need to know about the marathon – including tips, weather forecast and elite runners

Paula Radcliffe is running in her final London Marathon, the race in which she set a world record time of 2:15:25 some 12 years ago.

Organisers are pushing the #thankyoupaula hashtag, while tributes are sure to sound out from the crowds lining the Mall for the athlete whose records have not only been unmatched, but exist in a category of their own.

As demonstrated in our graphic below displaying the 2,500 fastest times in women’s marathon history, no one has even got near Radcliffe’s 2003 record in London nor at any other marathon. Neither has Radcliffe’s woman-only race record of 2:17:42 set in London in 2005 been in any danger of being trumped. On desktop, you can hover over any dot to see who ran that time, when, and where. Click on the prompts to highlight times run in London, or Paula's times.

#cam-d3-paula .axis path, #cam-d3-paula .axis line { fill: none; stroke: #069ddc; storke-weight: 6px shape-rendering: crispEdges; }

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d3.csv("https://citypm.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/data-553a001f20413.csv", function(error, data) { data.forEach(function(d) { d.date = parseDate(d.date) d.age = +d.age d.time = +d.time; });

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All data from all-timeathletics.com, updated 19 April 2015.

The three fastest times in marathon history all belong to the British Olympian and are more than three minutes ahead of the next nearest time – Kenya’s Mary Keitany is next with a time of 2:18:37.

Only four other women have ever run under two hours and 20 minutes in London, and it has been done just 20 times in any marathon in the 12 years since Radcliffe sailed past the mark by almost five minutes.

In 2003, at age 29, Radcliffe set the marathon world record, a stellar year in which she also won gold in the Commonwealth Games 5,000m, European Championships 10,000m and the World Cross Country Championships.

So dominant are her best times that her personal best is around 3.5 minutes faster than that of Rita Jeptoo, the best marathon runner in the world last year, who tested positive last December for the blood-boosting drug erythropoietin (EPO).

EPO was made famous by its abuse in cycling and has been found to boost normal cyclists’ stamina (time to exhaustion) by up to 54 per cent in lab trials, although effects on elite athletes are likely to be less dramatic.

Another measure of her dominance is the margin of victory: her best time is 2.36 per cent better than Keitany's, the second-placed woman. On the men’s all-time list, the fastest man, Dennis Kimetto, has a time 0.06 per cent better than his nearest rival. The man in tenth, Haile Gebrselassie, has a time 0.8 per cent slower than Kimetto’s. You have to go down to 105th place before Kimetto has a gap greater than that between Radcliffe and the second fastest woman.
 
 
Radcliffe doesn’t appear on our graph since finishing third in Berlin in 2011, having been dogged by a foot injury that has seen her miss out on the last two events in London.

For the time being, Radcliffe’s record looks pretty safe. Yet she herself believes the record won’t last forever. She told British Athletics: “It will be beaten at some point, that’s the nature of the sport. I don’t believe I have any more talent than anyone else.”

Yet even if and when it is, Radcliffe’s phenomenal achievements are guaranteed to loom large over the London Marathon for a long time to come.