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China's expectations for Liu Xiang

(Timesonline)
Updated: 2008-07-24 13:16

It has always been destined to be a victory parade, the moment when the Chinese celebrate their staging of the Olympics with the nations favourite sportsman winning their only gold medal on the track. There may be stacks of successes in the more traditional Chinese sports, such as table tennis and diving, gymnastics and weight-lifting, which should propel the country to the top of the medal table for the first time. However, what the host nation has craved has been to adorn the Birds Nest stadium with Liu Xiang winning the 110m hurdles, to demonstrate how the Chinese can excel in an event for which they do not seem physically suited.

China's Liu Xiang competes to win the men's 60m hurdles final at the 12th IAAF World Indoor Athletics Championship in Valencia March 8, 2008. [Agencies]

If Sydney had Cathy Freeman in the final of the womens 400m as the centrepiece of the 2000 Games, then Beijing has been focused to an even more suffocating extent on Liu Xiang. Everywhere in Beijing, his face has been beaming down from advertising hoardings.

When he broke the world record in Lausanne two years ago, there was a 20-minute item on the national news. In public, he is mobbed wherever he goes and he has been forced to drive around in a car with darkened windows to escape the persistent attention of obsessive fans. When a competitor was chosen to run the first leg of the torch relay at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in March, there was only one possible candidate.

His Olympic victory, which a country of 1.3 billion people insists must take place next month, could well still happen. Liu has the pedigree. He was, after all, gold medallist four years ago in Athens, equalling the world record of Britains Colin Jackson and demonstrating that he can produce his best in the most fraught of conditions. Liu thus became China's first male Olympic athletics champion in history.

Liu said of his performance: "[It] changes the opinion that Asian countries don't get good results in sprint races. I want to prove to all the world that Asians can run very fast. I am a Chinese and considering the physiology of the Chinese people, it is something unbelievable."

He also became the first athlete of nonAfrican descent to go under 13 seconds for the distance. Liu followed up his victory in Greece with a silver medal at the 2005 world championships and then began to dominate the event as he got older and more experienced, setting his world record the following year.

He was the 2007 world outdoors and 2008 world indoors champion and a few months ago seemed the unquestioned favourite to add another Olympic crown this year. Perhaps, as he celebrates his 25th birthday, he can still be comforted by being regarded as the favourite for the Olympic title, but he is no longer the unquestioned favourite. Victory has now become far from assured.

When Liu won his speciality, to rapturous applause, in the Goodwill Games in the Birds Nest stadium in May, a test event for the Olympics, he bounced off the track to say, predictably, that "the venue is up to international standards and the track was okay for me, not too soft and not too hard".

Everyone was relieved. Lius endorsement was the one that counted for the authorities and the confidence in his own prowess heartened his supporters.

Then things began to go awry. Knowing that he doesn't have the necessary opposition in Asia to sharpen his form and fitness, two races were arranged in June in the United States. Liu was forced to pull out of the Reebok Grand Prix in New York at the beginning of June with a sore hamstring, a perennial hazard in an event where competitors have to stretch their lower bodies at speed to get over the barriers. However, he did enter the Steve Prefontaine Classic in Eugene, Oregon, insisting that he had recovered from his injury. Feng Shuyong, the national team coach, who was accompanying Liu, was adamant: "It was a very big consideration and we certainly didn't want to take any risk."

However, Liu was disqualified from the event for a false start, his third in as many races. His personal coach, Sun Haiping, explained that "it was a relatively small accident. He was just too eager to run well", saying that the mistake had nothing to do with the recent hamstring strain. He added: "Over the next month, we will focus on his start." The group then hurried back to Beijing to restart training while planning to get a couple of domestic races in China before the Games.

However, when Liu lines up for his heats in the Olympics, it does not seem likely that he will have taken part in any high-class outdoor race this year.

After the setback in the United States, worse was to come. On June 12, Dayron Robles, more than three years younger than Liu and running in the outstanding tradition of Cuban hurdlers, shaved one hundredth of a second off Lius world record in Ostrava in the Czech Republic.

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