Men’s 110m Hurdles - PREVIEW

old Liu Xiang won a surprise Olympic gold medal in the men’s 110m Hurdles final at the Athens Games four years ago and even more surprisingly equalled the World record of 12.91, he not only made history as the first ever Chinese male athlete to win an Athletics Olympic gold, he immediately began on the path to the next Olympic Games on home soil...

Indeed the new poster boy of a whole country has in the intervening years been the most mediatised and publicised sportsperson in China, and it is reckoned his event will be the defining point of a fortnight of phenomenal Olympic sports action in Beijing.

Since winning the title in Athens, Liu has gone on to win silver and then gold at the World Championships respectively in Helsinki and Osaka and set a World record 12.88 in Lausanne in between. He also added the one title that was missing on his outstanding resume when taking gold at 60m Hurdles in the 2008 World Indoor Championships in Valencia, in what was his first competition of the winter season.

Things couldn’t have looked brighter for the 25-year-old native of Shanghai until injury struck at the worst time. After an outdoor season’s opener of 13.19 in Osaka and an easy 13.18 win at the Good Luck Beijing test event in the Olympic stadium last 23 May, Liu has not been able to complete a full 110m Hurdles race.

Training away from intruders, under the guidance of his long time coach Sun Haiping, Liu is expected to return at the top of his game come the opening round of his event on 18 August.

However, Liu will have to deal not only with his own physical shape but that of his main opponent and great friend Dayron Robles who at 21 years of age is looking at his first Olympic Games as possible redemption time.

The latest wonder of Cuban athletics, Robles has reached levels of hurdling that had never been imagined before. The owner of five of the six fastest times of the year, he became not only the World record holder with his 12.87 race in Ostrava but also the only man ever to run under 12.90 on two occasions after his equally impressive 12.88 in Paris. If you add to those a 12.91 and a 12.96, clearly Robles has done in one year what the previously best ever never achieved in an entire career.

But Robles too will have some proving to do in Beijing as already he has gone into a major championship as one of the favourites and has blown it. In Valencia, where a rookie mistake stopped him advancing past the opening heat, or in Osaka, where he fell under pressure to perform and finished a disappointing fourth, Robles said he’d learnt the lessons so that he will not falter again in Beijing.

Behind Robles and apart from Liu, American champion David Oliver looks like the most likely contender for a medal or the title. With his 12.95 from Doha, he is the only hurdler other than Robles to have gone under 13 seconds this year.

At 29 years of age, Terrence Trammell will be the most experienced of a very strong American trio and with already two Olympic silver medals in his closet, he has never hidden his gold medal ambitions. Osaka bronze medallist David Payne, the third survivor of the US Trials, should also be in medal contention, and as Robles himself stated after his World record, only the five men mentioned are realistic challengers for the top three positions.

And if all the conditions are good, it may well be that the defining moment of the Olympic Games in Beijing brings with it a new World record...

Laura Arcoleo for the IAAF