Xie Zhenye earned his second gold medal at the Chinese National Games as he improved his own national 200m record to 20.20 at the quadrennial multi-sport competition in Tianjin on Tuesday (5).

They may have a population of 1.4billion, but China has never managed to get a sprinter into a 100m, 200m or 400m final across the past 14 editions of the IAAF World Championships.

With China enjoying huge success at the Asian Games, where the athletics action ended just nine days ago, it was always clear that many of the top athletes gaining success there would not appear at the National Championships on 9-12 October just more than a week later.