Liu Xiang is out of 110 metre hurdles

Amz

He pulled up in the heat after a false start and was forced to withdraw, with an achilles injury. Very disappointed for him.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/olympics/athletics/7567283.stm

RoyMcC

Great shame - the hosts built up the Games around him to a great degree. He must be crushed.

Trammell also out. Looks like the door's wide open for Robles - and the minor medals are anyone's.

robinph

Fair play to him for even bothering to turn up at the track today. You could see that he'd no intention of completing the race before the start but just wanted to at least start for the crowd, then somone went and false started.

Racing Flat

I thought this was ridiculous. Why even line up if in that much pain? He was wincing just walking out on the track, in apparent agony when stretching warming up and getting on his marks. Firstly I don't believe you could be in that much pain at rest and secondly, if you were, you wouldn't line up, leading me to believe he either bottled it, or he was really injured and wanted to get the 'how brave' sympathy vote from the crowd. Cringy!

robinph

Not appearing on the start line wouldn't have been an option available to him as long as he was still able to stand upright.

Amz

He was clearly in agony, but can you imagine the level of pressure and expectation on his shoulders?

I'm sure had it been any other competition in any other country he wouldn't have warmed up, but he probably felt he had to at least try and hope for a miracle.

Sonia O'Sullivan started an Olympic final with a dodgy tummy, I'd say mostly due to the level of expectation at home. Same with Paula Radcliffe in '04 and even this year.

Racing Flat

robinph wrote: »

Not appearing on the start line wouldn't have been an option available to him as long as he was still able to stand upright.

I suppose that's what's ridiculous and led to this charade.

Racing Flat

Amz wrote: »

Sonia O'Sullivan started an Olympic final with a dodgy tummy, I'd say mostly due to the level of expectation at home. Same with Paula Radcliffe in '04 and even this year.

The difference there was that Sonia would have hoped that she might still be able to pull one out of the bag, Paula in 2004 didn't know she was 'unhealthy' until afterwards. This year she was hoping that she had enough fitness and the lack of rad running wouldn't affect her - so they still had a chance. Liu was clearly not going to run, or wouldn't have been able to with an Achilles problem, so shouldn't have been on the line.

robinph

The like of Paula and Sonia failing though just results in a few nasty headlines in the newspapers. Appearing at a home Olympics, and also the fact that country is China, is a much bigger deal and he has been the face of this Olympics in Beijing. Phelps who?

zAbbo

Bit of a sham, didn't look like he was ever going to compete.

BillO' calls it as a 'soap opera'

cfitz

robinph wrote: »

Not appearing on the start line wouldn't have been an option available to him as long as he was still able to stand upright.

Perhaps you are quite right, but I follow both athletics and current affairs to some extent and I'd be interested to hear something that backs up this statement.

juvenal

If you read Clifford Coonan's article (The Irish Times' and The Independent's China correspondent), you'll get an idea of the expectation about this guy.

The Irish Times wrote:

BEIJING 2008 ATHLETICS: A BLOW TO the very heart of China. Handsome, charming, intelligent and famously fast, champion hurdler Liu Xiang was China's secret weapon, an athlete who bore the hopes and dreams of 1.3 billion people on his shoulders, a man who was simply not allowed to lose. And in the Bird's Nest stadium, incredibly, he lost.

Imagine Eamonn Coghlan crossed with Sonia O'Sullivan and you get the idea. China was stunned when national hero and 110 metres hurdles Olympic champion Liu Xiang hobbled out of the Games injured yesterday, and a country's dreams of gold in a discipline in which China has only recently emerged, were dashed.

On the blogs run by the state broadcaster CCTV, there was no forgiveness.

Wang Tong, a sports journalist, said : "Liu Xiang used to be and still is a hero in my mind. But there is the only regret: Before Liu Xiang went out of the Bird's Nest with his injuries, why not wave to the audience, or bow to them?"

"We cannot accept the fact that Liu Xiang quits! Liu Xiang dispels all the passion of Chinese people," ran one irate web posting.

While stunned and shocked, the angry reaction on the state broadcaster did not entirely reflect the feeling on the streets of Beijing, where people were terribly disappointed, but ultimately resigned.

It's not all about golds, and Chinese people have really enjoyed the broader sense of the Olympics. China leads the medals table with a seemingly unassailable 37 gold medals, with the United States way behind with 20.

It's about the kind of gold medals a country wins. Liu was, and remains, someone special. When Liu won the 110-metre hurdles in Athens four years ago, there was genuine disbelief in China - he had overcome a genetic disposition that meant Chinese people were physically incapable of winning in track and field.

As we've seen in these Games, Chinese people are good at gymnastics, at table tennis, at badminton, at diving, but people believe their legs are too short to compete in track and field? That was for the Americans, not the Chinese. Tyson Gay's failure to qualify for the men's 100-metres is no compensation.

Still, Liu, the man who took the Olympic torch from President Hu Jintao in Tiananmen Square in March, who has held the world record in his sport and is simultaneously World and Olympic Champion, just limped off.

"He is under too much pressure, he was afraid of failure. Chinese people put too much attention on him. I wonder if he was injured, why didn't he quit the competition previously? Why those doctors still let him compete? Maybe I am wrong. I have watched the game. It's a pity," said Li Mingyue, 46, a grocery owner in Beijing.

Many Chinese felt that Liu's constant presence on advertising hoardings possibly drained his ambition. "I really thought that Liu Xiang could take less time to engage in advertisement, and spend more time in training. In reality, you are flying 1.3 billion people," said Ye Kuangzheng.

Harsh words. There is no question that a population of 1.3 billion can exert a certain pressure.

"The national pressure crushed him. After the Athens Olympics, Chinese people concentrated on him very much. We all view him as a national treasure. But he is just a human being. I think the pressure from 1.3 billion Chinese people is too much for a man. Just let him have a good rest," said Chen Baotian, 38, a statistics teacher.

Liu was training in secret, away from the public attention which he has courted, but ultimately it always looked like an effort to mask the fact that he was not fit.

Liu advertises everything from milk to Nike, who make a bespoke pair of spikes for him called the Nike Zoom Aerofly LX, as well as Cadillac and Coca-Cola and is on every hoarding, on the side of every bus and features in countless TV ads.

And there is charity there for what might have been.

"It's quite ordinary. Many athletes have quit competitions in history.

"In four years, he will be 29. I think he can still compete in the London Olympics. I like him not because what he can do in the future but because what he did," said Zhang Jie, 27, an architect.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/sport/2008/0819/1218868120076.html

cfitz

Yeah that's still just quotes from random people though. If you went around surveying people after Sonia O'Sullivan's performance in 1996 you probably would have got lots of ridiculous quotes from people who didn't know what they were talking about. Don't think it suggests a burden of pressure that would push an injured athlete to compete.

I don't know what to make of it myself, but I'm not sure that Liu Xiang would have made it as far as he has in athletics if the people around him were just using him for national pride without regard for his wellbeing.

juvenal

I agree that he shouldn't have even togged out if he wasn't fit.

From rumours regarding gymnasts ages, to fake singing and the fake ethnic children, there's been huge moves from official China to ensure that the country is seen in the best possible light and be the most succesful. It's plausible that there was enough pressure from outside sources for him to at least make the start line. From what I can gather he's a #1 product endorser in China. Perhaps there was commercial pressure, or he felt he had to try for his own business reasons, a lá Ronaldo in WC 1998.

We'll probably never know.

thirtyfoot

As someone who has dabbled in the black art itself, Robles is just poetry in motion, divine, as close as possible to perfection and is the prime example to the belief that hurdling is as much about rhythm as it is about speed.

Does anyone else think he is going for the Ed Moses look??

ronbyrne2005

Imagine if he had been using banned substances in past but could not take them coming up to this event as testing was now decting it. That would be enough to make sure he pulled out. I've heard in China this year it's better to not finish race than not win gold as a hyped up chinese athlete.
This is just a theory and no evidence he or chinese communist system use performance enhancing substances.

juvenal

Tingle wrote: »

As someone who has dabbled in the black art itself, Robles is just poetry in motion, divine, as close as possible to perfection and is the prime example to the belief that hurdling is as much about rhythm as it is about speed.

He looks class alright - the rhythm/speed theory was again proved in the 100m women's hurdles where Lolo faltered despite looking like she was safe in first.

Perhaps Liu Xiang pulled out thinking that Robles was going to beat him. I get the impression that it would be better to exaggerate injury and pull out in front of the home crowd rather than the Golden Boy of China fail to win on the biggest stage of all. All idle speculation. . .