2012 London Olympics – Track and Field: Liu Xiang of China Crashes Out of Olympic 110-Meter Men’s Hurdles – NYTimes.com

LONDON — The champion hurdler Liu Xiang, the most prominent athlete from China competing in the London Games, suffered another painful Olympic exit on Tuesday morning. Liu Xiang of China was frustrated in the hurdles for the second consecutive Olympic Games.

Four years after Liu had to withdraw from the men’s 110-meter hurdles in the Beijing Olympics, devastating his millions of adoring fans in China, he left the competition here without clearing a single hurdle in a preliminary heat. Just as in 2008, an Achilles tendon injury was his undoing.

Liu, a former world-record holder in the event and the gold medal winner at the 2004 Athens Games, drove his left foot into the first hurdle and tumbled to the track, grasping his lower right leg.

He lay on the track, then rose and hopped toward the exit before returning to hop quickly up the track next to the hurdles on his left leg, symbolically finishing the race. When he neared the finish, he crossed back onto the track and kissed the final hurdle in his lane.

A leader of China’s track and field team, Feng Shuyong, said tests at a hospital were needed to confirm the initial diagnosis that Liu had torn his right Achilles tendon…

via Liu Xiang of China Crashes Out of Olympic 110-Meter Men’s Hurdles – NYTimes.com.