The picture of the Australian striding towards his second successive Commonwealth marathon title on his home roads of the Gold Coast past the stricken figure of Scotland’s Callum Hawkins does not look great, admittedly.

But it’s a strange convolution of this social media age that Shelley should since have suffered reported online abuse for failing to stop and...well, no one seems to be quite sure what he was supposed to have done for the stricken Scot, who had Games staff standing alongside him at that point, although he was not being yet attended to by a medic.

“I saw Callum on the ground at the 40km mark,” Shelley said immediately after the race. 

“It’s obviously a shock to see that sort of thing happening so hopefully he’s doing better now. I was struggling myself when I got to the finish line. My hand started to go a bit, it started to lock, which is the start of hitting the Wall. So I had to try and refocus on myself and finish as best I could.”

The question was asked of him: “Was there any part of you that wanted to stop and ask ‘Are you okay?’”

Shelley’s response was: “There is that side, because you don’t like seeing someone fall over like that, but there’s the competitive side as well because you’ve got to finish the race.”

Shelley later told the Sunday Mail: “It was just what happened. I saw the volunteer beside him and I didn’t see any lead-up. I just saw that he was getting help.”

Those sticking up for Shelley included Australia’s Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove and Gold Coast 2018 chairman Peter Beattie, who commented: He’s a very decent and sensitive guy, and there’s no doubt he’s been hurt by the criticism, which is totally unwarranted.”

Australian comedian Dave Hughes said on the Hit network’s Hughesy & Kate Show: “I’m angry, I’m really angry.

“Trolls are trolls and haters are going to hate but sometimes they’ve just got to get their facts straight.

 “Shelley is so shattered he regards his gold medal as being tarnished.

“He’s not the Red Cross, alright. We’re not at Gallipoli.

“He’s not Simpson and his donkey.

“It’s anti-Australian, that’s what I’m saying. People are hypocrites.”

Australian’s Gold Coast Chef de Mission and highly respected marathon runner Steve Moneghetti, who won gold at the 1994 Commonwealth Games, was on Hughes’ side.

“You’re angry and you’re not alone, I’m angry too. I wish a few of those trolls would get off their trolling and get out and put themselves in that position,” Moneghetti said.

“I just feel so sorry for Michael...I was there, I saw him just as he finished and he was distressed, he was having enough trouble just holding it together himself.

“The first thing you’ve got to do in a marathon is beat the event. It’s got nothing to do with beating the competition or the opposition, you’ve just got to overcome the event because it is a traumatic event and at that stage in that heat you’re just focusing on yourself getting across.”

Shelley was not the only runner to move past Hawkins - Uganda’s Solomon Mutai, who took the silver medal, and Scotland’s bronze medallist Robbie Simpson also ran past en route for the line.

Simpson admitted it had felt "pretty terrible" to have run past his team-mate, adding: "To see someone who I respect so much just lying there was awful."

Neither of these runners was censured - and nor should they have been.

Hughes may be correct in his suggestion that the adverse reaction Shelley encountered from numerous people online was anti-Australian. But he may be been wrong.

The sight of Hawkins, who appeared on the cusp of the greatest athletics achievement thus far in his career, coming to grief so dramatically just over a mile from home was deeply distressing, as was the extended wait before medical help was at hand.

No doubt there was some of that impotent distress filtering through to Shelley’s Twitter feed a little later.

But if Shelley, as the Australians put it, copped some abuse, then there are thousands of runners who are open to the same criticism. Sunday’s  London Marathon was run in temperatures that reached a record high of 23C and very sadly one talented young man died after collapsing soon after the 22-mile mark.

One random finisher described the final few miles of the race as looking like an A&E department, with halted and recumbent bodies on either side of the road.

When I ran the London Marathon in 2011 it was also pretty hot, and I remember seeing a number of faltering, or faltered runners in the final stages. I didn’t stop for any of them.

It was not a rational demand to make upon the Australian. But it cannot be denied that selfless gestures witnessed in the field of sport in general, and running in particular, have a powerful and enduring appeal.

Two years ago at the Rio 2016 Olympics, for instance, New Zealand’s Nikki Hamblin and Abbey D’Agostino were lauded for putting each other first during their women’s 5000m heat after both came to grief  in a fall four laps from the end.

Hamblin tripped, and D’Agostino, running behind her, landed heavily on her as she lay on the track, before jumping up and hauling her opponent to her feet.

Soon afterwards, however, D’Agostino subsided to the track on all fours, her right leg injured as a result of the fall. Hamblin checked, turned and ran back to her opponent, whom she then accompanied on a halting progress to the line well after the main field had finished before the two runners embraced and the US athlete left the arena in a wheelchair.

“Sometimes you have to remember trying to be a good human being is more than, you know...” said Hamblin. “”If I hadn’t waited for her or tried to help I would have been 10 or fifteen seconds quicker, and what does that matter?”

I witnessed this athletics sub-plot. 

It was a sequence of action that elicited applause in the stadium that was of a different nature to that which accompanied other, more usual athletic endeavours.  Hamblin, referring to the first effort by D’Agostino, later commented: “Suddenly there’s this hand on my shoulder, like ‘get up, get up, we have to finish this!’ I’m so grateful for Abbey for doing that for me. That girl is the Olympic spirit right there.”

The incident was widely praised on social media…

There are deep resonances here, even echoes of the parable of the Good Samaritan.  

Similar ripples of approval emanated from Alistair Brownlee’s actions in putting his arm around his brother Jonny and half carrying him the final few hundred metres of the World Triathlon Series race in Cozumel, Mexico in September 2016 after the latter, looking set for a win that would have made him world champion, had weaved to a halt in the heat.

“If it happened to anyone I would have helped them across the line because it’s an awful position to be in,” Alistair Brownlee told the BBC. “If he’d conked out before the finish line and there wasn’t medical support it could have been really dangerous.

“It was a natural human reaction to my brother but for anyone I would have done the same thing. I think it’s as close to death as you can be in sport.”

Sixty two years before the Gold Coast marathon, another Australian race produced an example of selflessness that has since been commemorated in bronze.

The mile race at the Australian National Championships preceding the 1956 Melbourne Olympics was a frantic, cluttered affair, and early in the third lap 19-year-old Ron Clarke, who would go on to set 17 world records at longer distances, was tripped while leading and fell.

Fellow Australian John Landy, the world mile record holder, stopped and doubled back to check on the young runner, helping him back to his feet, then following him as the two men sought to regain the leading pack.

Landy, incredibly, managed to make up the deficit and win the race.

According to the National Centre for History and Education in Australia, "It was a spontaneous gesture of sportsmanship and it has never been forgotten."

Sculptor Mitch Mitchell created a bronze sculpture of the moment when Landy helped Clarke to his feet which now stands in Melbourne’s Olympic Park.

In practical terms, however, Hawkins was not an athlete who needed simply to be hauled back to his feet, or even a weaving figure who required to be shepherded several hundred yards to a haven of care.

Hawkins needed only one thing at that moment - urgent medical attention.

Happily recovered, but sensibly cautious about the timing of his next competitive outing, Hawkins has had time to reflect upon the trauma of his Gold Coast run.

Even in his extremity of overheating, Hawkins hung onto the fact that athletes who get any roadside assistance face immediate disqualification.

But, admitting he had little memory of what happened, he told the BBC that, in hindsight, race officials should have been able to take the decision to pull him out of the race.

"I was desperate for a medal and I had put everything I could into it," he said.

"So for somebody to stop me I probably would have told them to get one, but once I'd got back up, I had no recollection of it, so maybe I should have been pulled.

"Maybe there needs to be a rule put in that, after two falls or something, or so long that it looks like you're not getting any better, there needs to be somebody to pull it like boxing."

Maybe he’s right.