The Tyne Bridge, the prototype for Sydney's celebrated harbour crossing, was just 14 miles up the road, but the ultimate international athletics event of the year could hardly have been farther removed from the scene of the 2000 Olympic Games. The Great North Cross Country meeting brought the running world to Consett and the slopes of Berry Edge, where, once upon a time, Europe's greatest steelworks belched fire and brimstone into the wilds of north-west Durham Not that the remote setting was entirely inappropriate. Consett happens to be internationally renowned these days as the home of Derwent Valley Foods, manufacturer of the Phileas Fogg range of snack foods. It also has an historical mark on the global athletics map. On 12 September, 1953, the world record for the women's mile was broken on the town's old black shale track. Anne Oliver's time, 5min 8.0sec, was never officially ratified because only one timekeeper was present - three were required for a world record to be formally rubber-stamped - and her potential was never fully realised in an age when 200m was the longest distance for female athletes on the Olympic programme.In her footsteps yesterday followed a woman who won the Olympic 10,000m title in Sydney in 30min 17.49sec, faster than the great Paavo Nurmi's winning time in the men's 10,000m at the 1928 Games.

Derartu Tulu ran six-and-a-quarter miles at 4min 48sec mile pace to emerge victorious from the greatest-ever women's long- distance race in Stadium Australia on 27 September. In doing so, blasting clear round the final lap in a searing 60 seconds, the Ethiopian left Paula Radcliffe, the leader for 24 of the 25 circuits, to fade out of the medal picture.It was a different story yesterday. On six laps of the hilly snow-covered course, the former shepherdess from Addis Ababa was blown away by the bold front-running woman from Bedfordshire. By the end of the first circuit, Radcliffe was 20m ahead and forging relentlessly clear, like some supercharged Pippi Longstocking, with her calf-protecting elongated socks and her swinging pigtails. By the time she breasted the tape, after 20min 21sec, her East African rival was nowhere in sight.

The margin of victory was 1min 15sec, impressively emphatic even accounting for conditions that were clearly not to Tulu's liking."I have run in snow just once before," Tulu confided. "I dropped out after 200m." That was in the senior race at the world cross country championships in Boston in 1992. Radcliffe won the junior race that day, announcing her arrival on the international scene "I've always loved running in snow," she said. "I was born in a blizzard." Lately, Radcliffe has also been training in conditions similar to those she encountered yesterday, at the French training base she uses at Font Romeu in the French Pyrenees.The going is unlikely to be quite so Arctic when she attempts to relieve Tulu of her world cross country crown in Dublin in March, and she agreed with her vanquished rival that yesterday's one-horse race in the Durham snow will bear little relevance to the outcome at Leopardstown race course. "What it has given me is a psychological boost," Radcliffe said.