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On Aug. 27, 2004, Chinese track athlete Liu Xiang won the 110-m hurdles at the Olympic Games in Athens, equaling the world record of 12.91 sec. 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. I want to prove to all the world that Asians can run very fast.” In his comments Liu gave voice to his country's cultural stereotype, which, judging from editorial comments in Chinese newspapers, he was not alone in believing. “I am a Chinese,” he said, “and considering the physiology of the Chinese people, it is something unbelievable.” Liu improved his personal best of 13.06 sec, set earlier in the year, and became just the sixth man to have dipped under 13.00 sec. He finished the season with 4 of the year's 10 fastest clockings. Reaching 17 finals in the 60-m indoor hurdles and the 110-m hurdles, he lost just 2, both to American Allen Johnson. Liu, at 1.89 m (6 ft 2 in) and 85 kg (187 kg), was taller than most sprint hurdlers, and he showed spectacular athleticism in constraining his naturally long stride to the three-step pattern necessary for avoiding the alternation of lead legs in hurdling.

Liu was born on July 13, 1983, in Shanghai, the only child of a truck driver and a housewife. He was selected in the fourth grade to attend a junior sports school and won the national high-jump title for boys his age in his first year of competition. At age 15 he met hurdle coach Sun Haiping, who persuaded him to switch events. Although Sun described his pupil's technique as “terrible” in the beginning, Liu debuted internationally at the world junior championships in 2000 and finished fourth in the 110-m hurdles. He then won the event at the 2001 World University Games and in 2002 set world junior records indoors in the 60-m hurdles (7.55 sec) and outdoors in the 110-m hurdles (13.12 sec). In 2003 he raised his hopes for Athens, earning bronze medals at the indoor and outdoor world championships and the vote of Chinese sports journalists as his country's Male Athlete of the Year.

Liu, a 21-year-old student at East China Normal University at the time of his Athens victory, became the object of a bidding war between commercial sponsors. The Chinese Track and Field Association restricted him to four such deals.