Gary Hershorn writes: Without question the story of the day is Liu Xiang walking off the track.

When the unexpected story happens in front of you it’s a stressful few minutes as you try and understand what is going on and then decide how to illustrate the story. The most important thing to remember is that we are journalists and we must find a way to show what happened.

Usually in this situation you come up with a storytelling picture rather then a great photo and this picture of Liu Xiang pulling his numbers off his legs tells the story of an athlete pulling out of the competition.

PHOTO: Liu Xiang of China tears off a number tag before the start of his 110m hurdles heat of the athletics competition in the National Stadium at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games August 18, 2008. Liu failed to start his 110 metres hurdles first-round heat on Monday. After one false start Liu stopped before the first hurdle clutching his leg and then walked out of the stadium. REUTERS/David Gray

For a selection of other great Reuters pix from the Games click here.

“Well that’s it,” a journalist friend said when he phoned me at the Bird’s Nest a couple of hours after Liu Xiang hobbled out of the Beijing Olympics. “We might as well pack our backs and go home.”
 
We won’t, of course, but for us China-based reporters, this was always going to be the big one: the race that defined the Olympics.
 
I was in the Olympic stadium in Athens the night Liu won the 110 metres hurdles gold. Then it was a mild diversion, a tremendous performance from an unlikely source. He had barely finished his lap of honour, though, before his title defence in Beijing was being written about. It was too neat a line to miss.
 
Since then, I’ve written thousands of words about the skinny man from Shanghai with a penchant for karaoke and braised pork.
 
I was there last year, too, when he won his first world title on a hot and humid night in Osaka, his favourite track.
 
By then I’d been inside the Bird’s Nest and even as I pondered the raw concrete bowl with mud beneath my feet where the track would lie, I was thinking about how it would look and sound packed to its twisted steel rafters with a fevered Chinese crowd cheering Liu on.
 
We did see him run in the stadium at a test event earlier this year, but, to adapt a line from an American politician, I know Olympic finals and that was no Olympic final.
 
After his injury earlier this season, and his disappearance behind closed doors for a couple of months, I can’t even say I’m even surprised by what has happened. 
 
I have always felt sorry for Liu because of the pressure he was under and today also felt sympathy for his coach Sun Haiping, who has always come across as a thoroughly decent man. 
 
But rather selfishly, my main emotion is disappointment. We now know almost for certain that we will never hear the sound of 91,000 people celebrating an Olympic gold medal for one of their own in what must be one of the world’s finest stadiums.  

PHOTO (TOP): Liu Xiang of China grimaces in pain during his warm-up before the start of his 110m hurdles heat in the National Stadium at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games August 18, 2008. REUTERS/Ruben Sprich

PHOTO (BOTTOM): Sun Haiping, coach of China’s Liu Xiang, cries during a news conference at the National Stadium. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon

Liu Xiang’s quest to win a home Olympic gold ended before it had begun on Monday, as an injury prevented the 110 metre hurdler from starting his first heat.

China’s world and Olympic champion, the host nation’s best hope of an athletics gold medal at the Beijing Games, pulled up after a false start and walked off the track, stunning the huge crowd at the Bird’s Nest stadium into silence.

Liu’s preparations for the Olympics were hindered by a hamstring injury, and later an Achilles problem. It appeared to be a recurrence of the former injury on Monday as he grimaced in pain after leaving the blocks.

Along with basketball player Yao Ming, Liu is China’s favourite sportsman and there was a huge weight of expectation on him going into his home Games.

More later.

PHOTO: China’s Olympic champion Liu Xiang walks away after failing to start his 110 metres hurdles first-round heat at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, August 18, 2008. REUTERS/Gary Hershorn

With China vying to topple the Americans from the top of the Olympic medals table, it got me thinking about the Chinese national anthem.

It’s always a moving moment after any final to see the winner trying to hold in the tears and sing along with gusto on the podium as their country’s flag is hoisted.

We can all hum along to the “Star-Spangled Banner” of the United States and “Advance Australia Fair” and probably take a fair stab at the anthems of Russia, Britain, France and Germany as the opening notes strike up.

But what about China’s? I confess I couldn’t even guess where to start.

It seems I’m not the only one left scratching my head. When Liu Xiang received his gold medal for the 60 metre hurdles during the world indoor championships in Valencia in March, organisers inadvertently played Chile’s anthem instead of China’s.

So, a swift Internet search later and here it is. 

China finished second in the table in Athens in 2004, with 32 golds compared to 36 for the United States. With the boost of hosting the Games and the massive investment in elite sport in China, the race to be top of the table is sure to be close this year so we’re bound to hear the Chinese anthem a lot.

No doubt we’ll be humming along too by the time the Games’ closing ceremony rolls around on Aug. 24.

Watching athletics at the“Bird’s Nest” National Stadium is a dream for many Chinese people but it turned into nightmare for me last weekend.

We set off last Friday to see the titanic building and a relatively low-key athletics meeting mainly contested by young Chinese athletes.

There were, however, still tens of thousands of people at the showpiece venue for Beijing Olympics, most of whom were looking forward to a first glimpse inside the stadium and to watching their hero Liu Xiang in action.

But our passions gradually died long before we entered the Bird’s Nest.

It took us nearly one and a half hours from seeing the stadium from the road to actually getting anywhere near it.

Every junction was gridlocked and we had to drive another 3 kms further down the fourth ring road, which runs alongside the Olympic Green, to find a place to turn around.

Twenty minutes later, we reached an entrance of the stadium only to find that there was no parking lot.

“Go! Go straight!” one cop shouted to us at a crossroads. Several more shouted the same phrase at us as we continued and we drove more than 2 km more before finally parking our car in a temporary “car park” on the curb as the cops directed.

From there it should have been 15 minutes walk to our destination but we were not that lucky. Heading back to the entrance we had past earlier, we found chaos with hundreds of people milling around.

“Closed! Closed! There are too many people! We can’t bear it!” one officials shouted. “We will take you to another entrance soon, by free bus!”

Less than a minute later, an empty bus arrived but there was only room to take a very small portion of the anxious crowd. The others stood in lines, waiting for another bus.

Officials, police and volunteers shouted through loudspeakers, asking people to keep calm and orderly.

But they seemed incredibly anxious themselves, as if they were surprised to see so many people. All this with a crowd of only about 30,000 making its way into the 91,000-seater stadium.

“I can’t imagine what will happen here when the Olympic Games come,” said one man standing close to me. “They should be prepared for the event better than this.”

At one stage, some people behind us in the queue suddenly ran back to the gate, saying that it had been re-opened. We decided to wait on.

The second bus came ten minutes later and took us by a circuitous route to another gate on the opposite side of the stadium.

From there it was another 15-minute walk, through at least three security checkpoints, before reached the Bird’s Nest at last.

It was 8:30pm by then, one and a half hours after the action had started.

Another curious thing happened in the stadium when the athletes were being introduced.

“Lane one…” the announcer said. “From China!” (who?)

“Lane two…from China!” (who? again)

“Lane three…from China!”

Oh God, I know we Chinese don’t have lots of good runners besides Liu, but they could have found a list of their names.

Pictures by David Gray 

Liu Xiang, China’s top athlete, was the undoubted star of the show at the China Open Beijing Olympic test event at the Bird’s Nest last weekend and cruised to an easy victory over a weak field in the 110 metres hurdles.

Such is the national obession with his retaining his Olympic title in August, though, that two false starts in three days caused some consternation among his many fans.

Liu’s coach, Sun Haiping, blamed the Chinese characteristics of the starting pistol. The world record holder himself, while conceding his premature getaway in Saturday’s final was a mistake, had a more simple explanation for his yellow card on Friday.

“I deliberately made the false start in the semi-final in order to have a bit of fun,” he said after the final.

If you’re a multimillionaire athlete who can’t go out to shop or eat in a restaurant in your own country for fear of being mobbed by adoring fans, I guess you have to take your amusements where you find them.

The 24-year-old does have a good sense of humour but that might not be the beginning and end of it all.   

Liu’s slender build puts him at a disadvantage against his more powerful rivals over the first few metres of a race, a disadvantage his superior hurdling technique enables him to overcome over the full 110 metres.

If you bear in mind that the IAAF rules punish a second false start in any one race with disqualification, regardless of who jumped the gun the first time, it might not be the worst thing for a poor starter to do to keep his rivals on their toes.  

Picture by David Gray

In 2004, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao promised that the Beijing Olympics would be “smoke-free”.

So far, though, there has been no word on the rules and regulations that will prevent the world’s most enthusiastic smokers from puffing away while watching the Games this August.

There was brief flurry of excitement around the World Health Organisation’s World No Tobacco Day last May when some officials said the policy would be announced, but it never materialised. The rules, to be decided by the Beijing municipal government, are promsied soon.    

Some 320 million Chinese (and a few expat Westerners) draw on nearly 2 trillion cigarettes every year.

The offer and acceptance of cigarettes is a basic tenet of social and business interraction among men.

That is not just the case in rural China, where the men and women still often referred to as “peasants” might be forgiven for being ignorant of the health issues surrounding smoking.  

World and Olympic 110 metres hurdles champion Liu Xiang did promotional work for the Baisha Corporation, which sells 75 billion cigarettes a year.  

An executive with one of the top Games’ sponsors told me of a recent visit to the Olympic Tower, the sparkling headquarters of the Beijing organising commitee a couple of miles from the Bird’s Nest Stadium.

She was the only person among 20 or so at the meeting not puffing away, a scene unimaginable these days in large parts of the developed world.

But what is a non-smoking Olympics anyway?

Anyone who hates the very sight (or the merest whiff) of someone slowly killing themselves by cigarette might be disappointed by the laxity of the rules, if the experience of the 2004 Athens Olympics are anything to go by.

Greece has the highest number of smokers per capita in the world but its Games were also supposed to be non-smoking.  But smokers were able to idulge pretty much freely as long as they were not actually sitting in a seat at an Olympic venue. Pictures by Claro Cortes IV (top) and REUTERS/China Daily.