It’s a little after 11.30am on Sunday September 23rd, 1990. Bright autumnal sunshine filters through the grand edifices of Westminster and lights up the cordoned-off streets. It’s dry, not too warm – perfect running conditions. A race is imminent: advertising hoardings, admin tents and temporary grandstands are in place. Officials fuss around, walkie-talkies crackling. Just over 80 runners are assembled, their kaleidoscopic vests an arresting counterpoint to the austere grey of central London’s roads. 

From a distance this could be the preamble to any urban road run. But closer scrutiny reveals some striking differences. Familiarity, for one. The runners josh and joke; they greet one another with backslaps and banter rather than cursory handshakes. Manifestly, this is not a group coming together for the first time. Furthermore, beneath the bluster there’s an unmistakable air of fatigue. Creaking joints; injuries being nursed. To see these runners together you might well conclude that this is less of a start than a culmination. And you’d be right.

Nine laps of a 1.1-mile quadrangle await: round the tip of Trafalgar Square, beneath Big Ben, past Downing Street and the Cenotaph. But this will be no fizz-supping procession through the capital, a la Tour de France – the inspiration for the groundbreaking race that today reaches its climax. It’s going to be a dogfight; a final opportunity to boost overall standings and prize money; to put on a show for the crowds that have gathered, if not in their thousands, then at least on a scale not seen in any of the preceding 19 stages.

At exactly 11.45am the gun goes, and the runners flow over the line. A hierarchy quickly emerges. The two front-runners are impossible to ignore. One, a tall figure with a pleasingly fluid running style and bleached blonde locks who brings to mind a youthful David Beckham. This is Paul Evans, from Suffolk – a relative unknown until a couple of weeks before. He pushes hard, arrow-heading a breakaway group whose ferocious pace belies the pulverising attrition of the past three weeks.

“They’re surely running in the 4.40s per mile,” muses commentator and race advisor Tom McNab, author of 1982 bestseller Flanagan’s Run, based on the trans-American races of the 1920s and 1930s that this race also seeks to echo. 

“Definitely 4.40s,” agrees fellow pundit Ian Stewart, the Midlands-born, Saltire-swathed middle-distance giant of the previous two decades who’s helped craft the 240-mile course. 

Just behind Evans, Delmir Dos Santos is poised. It’s nine stage wins and counting for the Brazilian prodigy with the broad smile and the frightening conditioning, honed on the mountain trails of Colorado. 

The final lap begins. “That will be the sweetest bell the athletes have ever heard,” says a young, exuberant-haired Ray Stubbs, whose sure-footed anchoring of the race’s TV coverage has marked him out as a future sports broadcasting star. The pack becomes four, dropping Paulo Catarino, who doesn’t look overly concerned. The inscrutable Portuguese wears the yellow vest of the overall race leader and knows that, short of the pavement swallowing him up, the £35,000 prize for the overall winner is his. He’s done enough on the road to Westminster. 

There’s a final burst, a thrilling two-way sprint-finish between Dos Santos and Evans, and the Brazilian takes the tape. Others pour over the line behind them. Heavy-limbed hugs are exchanged. Other runners fall to their knees. Stubbsy grabs Evans for a finish-line interview. 

“The course was great!” he enthuses, panting hard. Second on the day, fifth overall – a hell of an achievement, he’s told. “Will you come back next year and win this event, Paul?” “You’re too right I will,” he says, beaming. 

Then Catarino, the race winner, is asked via a linguistic pass the parcel involving English, French and Portuguese what he thought of this inaugural event. “It is the most beautiful race,” he says, adding with an Armstrongian flourish: “This race proves that man has no limits.”

“Would he also return next year, to defend his title?”

“Definitely!”

But the Portuguese wasn’t back the following year. Nor was Evans, Dos Santos, Stubbs or any of the other expensively assembled field. The 160 officials didn’t return, nor the podium that had been transported at high-speed from start to finish, daily, for three weeks. Nor the 56-seater coaches for runners, the cavalcade of 25 cars, 15 minibuses, 11 lorries and trucks, 20 motorbikes and one ambulance that had snaked its way down through Britain. 

None of it. Because this unique event – The Sun Life Great Race – was to prove exactly that. A one-off. Preserved in aspic, it sits on a dusty shelf of running’s metaphorical museum – a pre-digital curiosity for future generations to squint at, analyse and perhaps ponder: what on earth were those who dreamed up this quizzical enterprise thinking?