It has always been destined to be a victory parade, the moment when the Chinese celebrate their staging of the Olympics with the nation’s 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 Bird’s 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.
If Sydney had Cathy Freeman in the final of the women’s 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.
Read More..
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.
0 comments:
Post a Comment