Ack, poor Liu Xiang, China's hurdler

Liu Xiang, a great track star, one whose ups and downs we've chronicled in the precursor to this blog, crashed into the first hurdle in the morning heat of his signature event, the 110 meter hurdle, Tuesday, August 7th, in the London Olympics.

He fell badly, and hopped the rest of the way around the track in order to protect his right angle.

There's an odd coincidence here. Liu was wearing the number 1356. The Chinese news agency Xinhua says that he had been wearing that same number when he was injured four years before at the Beijing games. Well, the first two digits of that number do have a reputation to uphold!

Liu has, as always, my sympathies. I don't know what happened to him in what should have been a routine prep heat for him but his career has helped shatter ethnic/racial stereotypes (an Asian championship in track? ) and the other racers/hurdlers at the Olympics seem to have treated him almost as an honored elder statesman of their sport. His own Olympic gold came in 2004, which is starting to seem like a long time ago, given the brevity of athletic excellence (although of course we should note that Liu has excelled in a variety of non-Olympic meets a lot more recently than that.)

Indeed, Liu's 2004 time of 12.91 sec. remains the Olympic record in the event

So ... who is the new leading light in this event? The gold in London 2012 went to Aries Merritt, who won with a speed of 12.92. As you can see, he came within a whisker of Liu's 2004 time.

Merritt is a US athlete, born in Chicago in 1985.

Comments

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog