By Steve Cram BBC Sport

It was a strange London Marathon, but in Evans Rutto and Margaret Okayo we had two deserving winners who both overcame problems to take their wins.

Rutto and Samy Korir were locked together until that big fall at the 20-mile mark, and initially it looked as if Korir had recovered better from the tumble.

But within a mile Rutto had broken away, and he just got stronger and stronger in the final miles.

He is a quality athlete. He ran very well in Chicago and in London he has shown that that performance was no fluke.

Jaouad Gharib's performance was also very good, proving that his win at the World Championships last summer was no one-off either.

Okayo and Rutto celebrate their London wins

Gezahegne Abera thought he had his Achilles problem sorted, but to drop out at such an early stage must put in doubt his hopes of defending his Olympic title in Athens.

The way he was limping makes you fearful that he wasn't just trying to protect it for later in the year.

With only three months to go until the Olympics, he doesn't have much time to get it right - and the Achilles is something that takes a long time to heal.

In terms of the lead changing hand in the women's race, Okayo just got too excited early on and went off at a pace that she couldn't maintain.

On another day it could have gone completely wrong for her, but sometimes when you have a bad patch early on you have enough time to get through it, recover and go again - and that's what she did.

They still ran a slow second half of the race, but that was partly due to Constantina Dita having her familiar problem - getting into a good position but being unable to maintain it.

There is obviously ability there, but she needs to have a good hard think about her tactics if she is to do anything on the big stage.

British hopes

There were other pointers towards the Athens Olympics - Okayo looks to be a threat to Paula Radcliffe, Sun Yingjie might think again about doing the marathon and the Kenyan selectors might need to think again about not picking Rutto.

And of course Jon Brown will be going after an impressive run on his marathon return.

I thought he looked very strong until the last few miles, and only then started getting a little tired.

He will run a similarly sensible race at the Olympics and hope that his rivals destroy themselves in the tough conditions.

Tracey Morris also did fantastically well to get inside the Olympic qualifying standard. To run two hours 33 minutes was phenomenal.

It just shows that the London Marathon can unearth talent - but it just makes you wonder what she could have done if she had started training at a younger age than 36.