But yesterday Tracey Morris was faced with a far more demanding approach to long-distance running after she qualified for this summer’s Olympics with an odds-defying performance at the London Marathon. As the first British woman to cross the line, she took the third place in the women’s Olympic marathon team alongside Liz Yelling and the world record holder Paula Radcliffe, who is one of her sporting idols.Mrs Morris, 36, who works full time as a contact-lens optician in Leeds, said she was now relying on the goodwill of her employers if she is to mount a serious challenge to the world’s elite in Athens, a city she visited four years ago to attend a wedding. “I have spoken to my boss, he had left me a message and they will support me and give me time off work to prepare for Athens,” she said.Since she crossed the finishing line in The Mall on Sunday she has been at the centre of a media whirlwind. Mrs Morris, who comes from Anglesey, north Wales, had intended to check in to a cheaper central London hotel and have a Sunday night on the town with fellow runners from the Sheffield-based Valley Striders and her husband, Paul, a PE teacher.

He had competed as a fun-runner and finished more than two hours after his wife. But instead, the couple were invited to the winners’ dinner with drinks, courtesy of the sponsors, and Mrs Morris was presented with her medal.Yesterday Mr Morris, 36, joked that his time of four hours and 45 minutes might have been faster had he not received a call on his mobile 11 miles into the race to be told of his wife’s achievement. “I spent the next hour on the mobile talking to friends and family and in the end I said I had to go and finish the race” he said.Mr Morris, head of sport at Leeds Grammar School, said he expected to see much less of his wife, whom he met during an eye consultation eight years ago and married three years later He said: “It’s fantastic and I am delighted for her. His funeral had been held in Leeds on St David’s Day but Glenda had wanted his final resting place to be Swansea.”I know now I really did make the right decision to bring him home,” she said after yesterday’s ceremony – a celebration of Charles’ life replete with rousing choral music and moving tributes – that also marked the handing over of his ashes. “I have been upset about it because he will be far away from me, but that is where he belongs. He belongs there with his family and friends.”More than 600 people, including former team-mates from Leeds, Juventus and Wales, packed Swansea’s Brangwyn Hall to celebrate the life of the “Gentle Giant”, who died in February, aged 72.

He belongs to the people.” So said Glenda Charles, the widow of the greatest footballer Wales has ever produced, as she bequeathed the ashes of her husband, John, to the city of his birth at a memorial service in Swansea yesterday.
“When he died what I wanted to do was to take his ashes to Wales,” said Glenda, who lives in Yorkshire, where Charles spent half of his spectacular and blemish-free 16-year playing career, in two spells at Elland Road. “He is Welsh. This is consistent enough with his policy of scatter-gun hiring and, now we are warned, firing. A few months ago a Madrid columnist wrote that Beckham was rivalling the impact of Alfredo di Stefano, arguably the greatest ever resident of the Bernabeu.Suddenly, that seems an awful long time ago and perhaps Abramovich should consider for a moment what he wants most from his biggest-ever purchase: a great player or a circus act of dwindling appeal?.

Can it be that Liverpool will really entrust the process to Houllier, and, when some relatively small amounts of money have been retrieved, allow him to march on into an undetermined future? No, surely it cannot be so. But then if you were Michael Owen would you seriously consider taking the chance?Chelsea must question motive of Beckham moveSo now it seems David Beckham is not an adornment of Real Madrid but a club presidential election issue.What happened to the dream of his conquest of football’s most glittering stage, to the Chinese torture his success was going to inflict on his former manager Sir Alex Ferguson?The word is that Roman Abramovich, Chelsea’s oligarch, will move for Beckham. It merely confirmed what a host of football men had been saying for so long: in the matter of creative style, Liverpool had been bankrupt for several years.Now we hear of a summer “fire sale” of some of the manager’s most ill-judged signings. Saturday night TV analysis highlighted Liverpool’s chronic failure to play the kind of incisive football which makes champions, and develops a pattern in which the gifts of an Owen are bound to thrive.We saw Liverpool players refusing to turn on the ball, playing it back and giving their opponents, Fulham, oodles of time to cover their lines. It was a sensible assessment of what was most crucial to the future of one of the nation’s few truly outstanding performers.Meanwhile, Houllier’s detachment from reality seems to be progressing at a rather alarming rate.