A farewell to Liu Xiang

This year, however, the moment the world’s best sprint hurdlers settle into their blocks for the evening’s final contest will be a particularly poignant one, not just because of the quality of the men about to fly over the 10 barriers in pursuit of Diamond League points, but because of one man who will never do it again.

That man, of course, is Liu Xiang, Shanghai’s most famous and successful track and field prodigy, who announced his retirement from competitive action just one month ago after finally accepting defeat in his three-year battle against injury.

Liu’s connection with the Shanghai Stadium goes all the way back to the very start of his career in 1999, just two years after it was built, when he raced here as a raw 15-year-old yet to break 14 seconds.

The following year he did just that, clocking 13.90 at China’s National Games in Jinzhou to set a world best for 16-year-olds, thus announcing himself on the world athletics stage which he has graced ever since with his fluent style and feather-light speed.

Liu’s performances over the years which followed read like a rapidly sketched run-down of the sport’s major honours and achievements.

In 2001, running in Shanghai, he lowered his best to 13.32, the fastest ever by a 17-year-old, and won both the East Asian Games in Osaka and the World University Games in Beijing, while he reached the semi-finals of the senior World Championships in Edmonton.

In 2002 he ventured onto the global circuit for the first time, competing across Europe and South America. Still only 18, he added the world junior record (for under 20s) to his growing tally, running 13.12 in Lausanne – also a world best for an 18 or 19-year-old – having previously clocked a world junior record for 60m hurdles during the indoor season.

By 2003 he was already a serious contender for senior honours and he finished the year with a brace bronze medals from the World Indoor Championships in Birmingham and the IAAF World Championships in Paris.

But it was his Olympic performance the following year that sealed Liu’s name in the annals of Chinese athletics when he matched Colin Jackson’s 11-year-old world record of 12.91 to win gold in Athens, beating silver medallist Terence Trammell by almost three-tenths of a second. He was only the sixth man ever to run under 13 seconds and became China’s first Olympic champion in a men’s track and field event.

Liu instantly became a star – not just in China where he has been fêted ever since – but across the world too. He had not only defied the clock, and his more fancied US rivals, but upset traditional thinking about Asian athletes.

Liu himself – still a 21-year-old student at East China Normal University – put his achievement into context when he said that his gold medal “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.”

He went on proving it in the years which followed, picking up a world outdoor silver in Helsinki in 2005, plus Asian and East Asian Games titles later that year. He finally smashed the world record in 2006 running 12.88, again in Lausanne, before winning gold at the Asian Games in Doha – his 10th win in 12 races that year.

The world outdoor title eventually arrived in 2007 when he clocked 12.95 in Osaka, setting him up perfectly, it seemed, for the defence of his Olympic crown on home soil in Beijing’s Birds’ Nest stadium 12 months later.

The fairy-tale seemed too good not come true – here was China’s biggest sporting superstar, the world record holder and world champion, defending his Olympic title in front of 90,000 of his own fans, in the world’s most iconic arena at his capital city’s first ever Olympic Games.

The expectations heaped on Liu’s young shoulders were huge. He was, quite simply, the host nation’s big hope – only hope – for a gold medal in the Games’s number one sport. All of which made the deep disappointment all the more intense when Liu walked off the track before his first-round heat on 18 August with a previousy unreported Achilles tendon injury.

If there had been any question about Liu’s national status beforehand, the crowd’s stunned silence and the enveloping sense of national confusion, even mourning, which followed for days after his withdrawal, left no doubt.

It turned out that Liu had been carrying the injury for six or seven weeks, and he was to carry it, on and off, for the next seven years. He was out of action completely for 13 months before returning at the 2009 Shanghai Golden Grand Prix.

He eventually won another global medal at the 2011 World Championships in Daegu when Dayron Robles – the Cuban who had taken his Olympic title and world record – was disquallified, and he broke an Asian indoor record for 60m hurdles at the start of 2012.

But his good form leading up to the Olympics that year came to nothing when the injury curse struck again as he took off at the first hurdle in his opening heat on the first day of athletics at the London Games. Liu’s fans went into mourning once again.

There was to be no Olympic redemption and, despite three years of operations and rehabilitation, Liu never recovered.

His retirement at 31, announced on 7 April this year, was greeted by words of sadness and appreciation from the world’s best sprint hurdlers. The Moscow world champion, David Oliver, described the news as “very sad” before adding: “I would like to say to him to keep his head up, and to take solace in the fact that he had a career that many people can only dream of. He left the track having accomplished everything there is to accomplish.”

There are few who would argue with that, least of all the Shanghai public who will get one last chance to show their appreciation of their favourite sporting son at this year’s IAAF Diamond League meeting on 17 May when there will be a special ceremony to honour and bid farewell to the one and only Liu Xiang.