"Chinese people love me because..... I sympathise with them over Liu Xiang."
Really, I do. I may have found myself (rather to my own surprise and disappointment, I may add) snarkily rooting against the home side on occasion (it's a reaction to all the crap us expats have had to put up with this year in terms of preparations for the Games and "security" arrangements, and to the ridiculous overkill of the Chinese media in trying to make the story of the Games purely, 100% about China's enormous medal haul), but I have cheered Liu Xiang every time I've seen him run since the last Olympics, and I was looking forward to doing so again this week.
He's the one true world-class sports star this country has. (I'm afraid I don't really count Yao Ming and the other major basketball players, because nobody gives a toss about basketball outside of America. Ditto, alas, with the other events where China is traditionally strongest. Diving is modestly photogenic, but dully repetitive; and its highly subjective - and, to the non-aficionado, utterly impenetrable - scoring system robs it of true sporting credibility. Badminton and table tennis are not that widely played, and are disdained in most of the West as "children's games". Shooting? Why is that even included? There were no guns in ancient Greece! And gymnastics - well, it's best not to mention the gymnastics at the moment, isn't it?)
Liu is an exceptional athlete - an Olympic champion, a world record setter, the first Asian to make an impact in track & field. He also seems to be a genuinely modest and wholesome sort of guy, a good role model for the kids. He'll be remembered for a long time. And I guess he's still young enough that he might get one more crack at an Olympic medal in London.
It's also great that he's found competition that can test him, especially Cuba's Dayron Robles. There's been very little to choose between the two over the past year or so, and stage was set for what might have been a truly great Olympic final between them.
So, it's really sad, not just for China, but for the Games as a whole and for the sport of athletics, that Liu has been forced to drop out because of his troublesome hamstring.
I hope the Chinese fans will go easy on him. I gather there's already been some sniping online about him being a coward and a quitter. Jeez! This guy is one of the toughest competitors in the world: I really don't think there's any way he would have withdrawn unless he really wasn't physically capable of taking part.
I do worry, though, that pyschological factors may have played their part in this. The injury does seem to have been strangely persistent, and it is the kind of thing that tends to happen when you're getting a little bit tight because of nerves. The pressure on Liu to repeat his Athens gold medal-winning performance in front of the home crowd had become unimaginably massive, thoroughly oppressive; and I was always anxious about whether he would be able to find his best form under these conditions.
But that was the great question of these Games; the major talking point, certainly, for the Chinese audience (who - rather worryingly for the organisers - now have no reason to pay any attention to the track & field events at all). Now, alas, we shall never know what the answer might have been.
But Liu isn't finished yet, I don't suppose. I hope he has a few glory days still to come - at the Asian Games, the next World Championships. And maybe in London in 2012.
9 comments:
Well, I gathered he'd been having hamstring problems for a while, and when I saw him pull up on TV he was holding his thigh - but apparently his coach his saying its an Achilles problem.
I hope no-one's going to quibble about that "world-class sports star" tag.
Of course, China has lots of world-beating performers in other events, but my emphasis here was on "star" - worldwide impact and recognition. Nobody knows or cares if Jin Dan is the Roger Federer of badminton because badminton doesn't enjoy a major worldwide TV audience. Guo Jing Jing is a superb diver, but most people only watch diving during the Olympics. Yao Ming is just one amongst many leading players in the NBA, and the NBA only has a fairly small following outside of North America. None of these is really a world superstar, a name recognised in every single country. (Yao Ming is, arguably - but more for the ubiquity of his use in advertising, particularly in marketing this Games, rather than for his sport and his status within it.)
Liu Xiang is one of the greatest athletes of the decade, and a real giant in the 110 metres hurdles event. As the first Asian to win an Olympic track event (and the person to finally overtake Colin Jackson's awesome world record that had stood for 13 years), he's achieved a major place in athletics history, in Olympic history.
I think his name probably is recognised in pretty much every country in the world. And there are a lot of people - not just Chinese - who share his disappointment at not being able to compete this year.
Basketball generally gets ranked as the number two most watched sport in the world. And one of the most played.
Pillock.
That would be "most watched" in America?? Which does have the largest TV audience in the world (if you see any surveys suggesting it's China, be very suspicious - not yet a while, I think).
Exclude America (and China, which now watches mainly because of Yao.... and the other guy), and what is the worldwide audience for basketball?
And is that dubious statistic of yours based on an average of viewers per game, the total volume of all viewers for all televised games, or the peak audience for the most important games? If the latter, I would say it is easily beaten out of No 2 spot by American Football (the Superbowl draws huge audiences all over the world), and by tennis (Wimbledon and US Open), and probably even by golf (US Masters' probably the biggest draw? or the British Open?).
You're the pillock, Cowboy. Go on, name me some countries in which the NBA has a major following - and show me the primetime viewing figures to back it up.
Yes, yes, of course it's the most played game in the world, because you can play it anywhere - and just about everybody on the planet (or at least, in the developed world), both man and woman, has played it at least once in a gym lesson. But watching it?! That remains very largely an American fetish.
Basketball is usually considered the second most watched sport worldwide. Europe has a very active fan base - not necessaruly the NBA, but the local leagues.
You are judging it from the basis of the UK, where it is not popular, rather than the continent on the other side of the Channel.
Of course the numbers aren't for a single game - they are for overall viewing. I will, when I get a chance, take a look for numbers, but every website I found in a brief search (many of them non-US based) listed it as the second most popular spectator sport in the world after football.
I can understand not liking hoops (though I think most people who complain about the NBA would like college ball more), but it is a very popular game worldwide.
Tennis and golf numbers are odd - they peak for individual events, then die off for the rest of the year. Tennis has suffered badly in the US, because there have not been great US men's players for a while, and the sport has got pretty tedious generally. Golf is a conundrum - when Tiger is challenging, the numbers are GREAT. When he is out of a tournament, it is moribund.
I think you are definitely letter your personal prejudices get in the way of reality here.
Well, I was talking about the NBA. I don't know of any other country in the world that regularly shows NBA games live, to significant audiences. I'd bet China is the only one.
I know basketball has pro leagues in many countries now, but can you name one in which it is the leading pro sport - or anywhere approaching that? I'd be very surprised. Although there are lots of surprising things about Lithuania.....
My point was, how many people around the world actually recognise Yao Ming? Probably quite a few, but more because he has been the main face used in promoting these Beijing Olympics; I think probably rather a small proportion of the world's population has ever watched an NBA game, and a pretty tiny percentage could be called regular fans. Compare with football.
Basically, nothing compares to football. It would be interesting to know what the Number 2 most popular world sport is in terms of TV viewers (in countries other than America). I really doubt it's basketball. Much as I hate the game, I suspect it might be rugby. It's played in a lot of countries, and the World Cup, in particular, has been very well promoted in recent years.
Or F1 racing, of course. Not really "a game", but a pretty huge worldwide deal on TV.
I was writing about Liu Xiang rather than Yao Ming here anyway.
The amazing thing here is that people seem to be genuinely SURPRISED at his dropping out. Oh, please - the guy's been having injury problems all season, and has been in complete seclusion for the past 2 or 3 months. I suspect he's known for a long time that he wasn't going to be fit, and was just forced to go through the motions of turning up for qualifying in order to satisfy the Chinese sponsors.
F1 claims very high viewing. I was trying to limit it to things everyone agrees are sports, and also, I guess, maybe things lots of people participate in as well as watch.
I agree football is head and shoulders the most popular sport - but in MANY of the countries where football is king, basketball will finish second or third. Such as much of Southern Europe, South America, Germany (possible), the Baltic States, Russia (I'd guess) and with a massive growth in Asia from what I hear.
The UK is the one out of the loop on this, not the other way round.
It won't be rugby. I would imagine cricket has higher TV viewership than rugby.
I'm not aware that basketball is yet HUGE anywhere. No 2 TV sport in Germany? Anywhere near as big as football? Evidence??
Rugby v cricket would be an interesting comparison. Cricket, of course, enjoys the huge advantage of being played by India. However, rugby is played by many more countries, and the major games - bizarrely, as far as I'm concerned - are watched and enjoyed even in countries that don't really play the game; cricket has a major intelligibility problem outside the gilded circle of former British colonies that took the game to their heart.
I may Google later to see if I can find worldwide TV viewer figures for the rugby and cricket World Cups.
My gut feeling - based purely on personal or 'anecdotal' experience - is that the rugby wins: amongst my friends here who like both sports, most of them make far more of an effort to watch the rugby world cup.
But it's really impossible to compare like with like on this. It's much harder to watch a cricket match in its entirety. And highlights are not really the same thing. On that basis alone, rugby probably wins. (Probably the same reason basketball beats out baseball in TV viewer figures in America. I would guess baseball is actually the bigger bums-on-seats sport, but there aren't going to be that many people who sit down to watch a whole game on TV, outside of the play-offs and the Series.)
The 'conspiracy theory' here, of course, is that Liu simply bottled it, that the pressure had all become too much, that he feared Robles is now better than him and that anything less than a win would be a national humiliation, a 'loss of face' for China, that his injury is essentially psychosomatic - or perhaps even just a convenient fiction.
This strikes me as utter tosh. But I would like to see a scan of his heel....
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