Wonder woman Shelly is the real deal on wheels

Shelly Woods is the best in Britain, one of the best five in the world and has every chance of winning three medals on track and road at the Olympic Games.

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Hardly had Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson announced her retirement as Britain's greatest Paralympic athlete last year than Woods moved into her spot on the grid to win last year's London Marathon. And then in November, when Radcliffe won in New York, she finished runner-up there.

The Flora London race is making a proper production of the wheelchair races this year, not because it has been left without a Briton of note in the able-bodied races but because New York, its fellow member of the World Marathon Majors group, has set an example.

In London the wheelchair races have always been the dustcarts before the Lord Mayor's show, shown on TV only when an able-bodied athletes passes one of the stragglers or in the finishing mile.

New York always gives the wheelies as much attention as those on two legs. They share a hotel with the elite athletes, star in media conferences and, on the day, are followed by the TV cameras.

London will now give them the same central role, and to mark the occasion the organisers have quadrupled the winners' prize money to a respectable £7,500. Wood thinks it is only fair.

'We've always been a bit apart,' she says. 'Now we're in the same hotel, all our expenses paid, we're treated as professionals which is as it should be because we are. Our sport is fast, exciting, tough and we train every bit as hard. I'm sure people would like to see more of it.'

She was stunned when Radcliffe came to sit with her at a banquet after last year's New York race. 'She's my heroine. It was fantastic. She even knew how I'd done, and we talked about it,' she says.

Attitudes have changed, she says, in part because of the pioneering work of Grey-Thompson but also because of London 2012. 'People are seeing it for what it is, a competitive, elite sport, not just poor people having a go,' she says.

It has brought her two good sponsors: the operator of shopping malls — 'my face is splashed all over plasma screens in one in Preston' — and a legal practice, plus an adidas endorsement contract.

To all intents, she is a full-time professional, receiving Lottery funding, but she works part-time in schools encouraging kids into sport and is helping the Spinal Injuries Association, the London race's official sponsor, to launch its Rebuilding Lives Through Sport scheme.

It has certainly worked for her. She is in the world's top five for 1500m, 5,000m and the marathon and qualified for the Paralympics in all three.

Sweden's Monica Wetterstrom set the fastest time for the women's event in London with a time of 1:48:09 in 1997 but Woods is second fastest after last year's time of 1:50:40.

Francesca Porcellato is the marathon world record holder with 1:38:29 set in 2005. Woods, 21, was a fifth of a second off the 500m world record last year but it is in marathon racing that she can make a living. Next year she intends racing in London, New York, Berlin and Japan.

Woods became wheelchair-bound when, at the age of 11, she fell 20ft from a tree when a branch snapped. She was on her back in a cast for eight weeks 'bored out of my mind' and in a spinal unit for five months. She was paralysed from the waist down.

'I went through a phase of "why me?" but you can't go through life like that. It could have been worse. I could have been paralysed from the neck down and totally dependent. So after a year I decided life's too short, you have to make the most of what you have. Now I can do anything I want. I just have to wheel myself around,' she says.

Sport was part of the rehabilitation. She tried everything, from basketball to table tennis, but by 15 she was hooked on racing. She now pushes her wheels up to 130 kilometres a week around her home in Lytham St Anne's. Her top road speed is 33km an hour.

On Sunday she will be a very plausible British stand-in for Paula. She adds: 'I've thought about that. Good, isn't it?'