Paula Radcliffe shares emotional moment as daughter Isla finishes London marathon after beating cancer
Celebrated marathon runner Paula Radcliffe was every inch the proud mother on Sunday as she celebrated her daughter Isla crossing the finish line at the London Marathon, just years after overcoming cancer.
Teenager Isla, 18, was diagnosed with germ cell ovarian cancer at just 13, back in August 2020, and endured weeks of intense chemotherapy.
Now in recovery, she took on the gruelling 26.2-mile challenge to raise funds for Children with Cancer UK, aiming to support other families facing the same hardship her own family went through.
As Isla powered through the final stretch, her athlete mum captured the emotional moment on Instagram Stories, zooming in on her daughter as she completed the race at 3:02pm.
In the video, Radcliffe can be heard cheering, “Go Isla, go Isla!”
She added a heartfelt caption: “When your little girl has had few finish lines — but she has her own. Well done Isla.”
Last week, Radcliffe has said it was “horrible” to watch her daughter undergo chemotherapy and described it as “the hardest thing a parent can go through”.
A decade on from Radcliffe’s final London Marathon and her 18-year-old daughter, who was diagnosed and treated for cancer in 2020, will be running her first 26.2-mile race in the capital.
The long-distance runner, 51, took Isla to the paediatrician during lockdown after she experienced a variety of symptoms including stomach aches and loss of breath.
“It then moved very quickly. On the Tuesday she visited the doctor, we had a scan on the Wednesday and one week later we were already in the hospital starting the first round of chemo,” she told the Radio Times.
Talking about the treatment, she said: “It’s the hardest thing a parent can go through. You can support them and be with them the whole way through, but you can’t do that chemo for them.
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“It’s horrible to watch your child suffering through that, but at the same time we believed that if it felt bad, it was killing the cancer.”
Radcliffe, who commentated as part of the BBC team during the marathon, added: “It’s an extremely emotional place to be anyway, when you see people turn that corner on the Mall and they realise they’ve done it.
“But when it’s your little girl doing it, that’s going to be a bit more emotional.”
Radcliffe told The Move Against Cancer Podcast in 2021 that Isla had undergone three rounds of chemotherapy and that it had been “really hard” for their family.
She returned to marathon running for the first time in a decade at the Tokyo Marathon in March and ran the Boston Marathon on Monday.