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We sat around the office TV watching. All work had ground to a hair. The Bird's Nest Olympic stadium was a full house and 90,000 pairs of eyes were glued to the track. No one even dared breathe. This wasn't even a final. Liu Xiang, the golden boy of Chinese sports, was setting himself up for the furst 110-meter hurdles qualifying heat when he pulled up after a false start. As he limped off with an ankle injury, his departure was met with gasps of collective disbelief in the stadium and stunned silence in my once. I was as dumbstruck as everyone else.