Loading ...Name: Liu Xiang
Gender: Male
Birth Place: Shanghai, China
Birth Date:July 13 1983
Height:1.89 m
Weight:74kg
Speciality:110m hurdles
Education: Huadong Normal University
Hobby: Singing, computer
Registered with: Shanghai
Personal best: 2006 Lausanne IAAF Super Grand Prix – Champion, 12″88
Liu Xiang wins the men’s 110m hurdles final in Athens 2004, tying a 11-year-old world record and bringing a 26th gold to China. It is the first gold Chinese men’s athlete has ever won from the track and field in the Olympics history.
Liu is one of China’s most commercially successful athletes and has emerged as a cultural icon. He is the first Chinese athlete to achieve the “triple crown” of athletics: World Record Holder, World Champion and Olympic Champion. That he would win another gold in the 110 metre hurdles at the Beijing Olympics was “China’s great hope”, but he had to withdraw from competition at the last moment after a false start and aggravation to a previously unrevealed injury.
Liu became just the sixth man to post a time under 13 seconds for this event. The ecstatic Liu at once fulfilled the great promise he had shown in setting a world junior record two years earlier and raised the hopes of his compatriots for a repeat victory at the 2008 Games in Beijing. Liu said that his performance, which brought China its first men’s Olympic gold medal in track and field, “changes the opinion that Asian countries don’t get good results in sprint races.
Liu finished the season with four of the year’s ten fastest clockings. Reaching 17 finals in the 60 m indoor hurdles and the 110 metre hurdles, he lost just two, both to American Allen Johnson. Liu, at 1.89 m (6 ft 2 in) and 85 kg (187 lb), was taller than most sprint hurdlers, and he has showed spectacular athleticism by constraining his naturally long stride to the three-step pattern necessary in order to avoid the alternation of lead legs in hurdling.
