Injury to Chinese basketball star dashes Olympic hopes

Aileen McCabe, Canwest News Asia Correspondent
Canwest News Service

SHANGHAI - All of China is in mourning for Yao Ming's left foot - or so it seems.

The stress fracture that has sidelined the seven-foot-three Houston Rockets star may have put an end to China's Olympic basketball dreams.

"Bad break for nation: Yao may miss Games," screamed the front page of the Shanghai Daily, in Yao's hometown Thursday.

"Olympic dream could fade with Yao's foot injury," said the lead story in the national China Daily.

"China's Olympic dream of basketball glory has been hit by a rude awakening - a tiny crack that can barely notice even on a CT scan," said the semi-official Xinhua News Agency.

"We are shocked," China Basketball Association vice-director Hu Jiashi told a news conference. "It is definitely something we didn't need with just about six months to the Olympics."

Yao is arguably China's one and only superstar athlete.

Since he was drafted into the National Basketball Association in 2002, he's become so famous at home that stories about him now routinely migrate from the sports pages to the front page. His wedding last summer was covered exhaustively by all the media and discussed endlessly in blogs. And his lucrative endorsements - Reebok, Pepsi, Visa, McDonalds et al - mean his face is everywhere in China.

And never so much as this year, because Yao is the face of the 2008 Beijing Games.

His square-jawed portrait is plastered on buses, in metro stations and billboards - everywhere there is an Olympic poster, and that's a lot of prime real estate given the government's determination to make sure the whole country is behind the Games.

Even with Yao leading the squad, Team China had few pretensions for gold next summer.

China's hoopsters didn't finish in the medals in Athens in 2004 and only got to the knockout stage in the 2006 World Championships. But, even the modest improvement to sixth place that the national squad hoped to make in front of friendly fans in Beijing, might not be possible without Yao.

Doctors say Yao's injury will take three to four months to heal, so theoretically he could be fit when the Olympics open on Aug. 8. But realistically, even if his foot is better he'll still need some time to get back into shape after his enforced rest.

Yao is no stranger to injury. The Oriental Morning Post helpfully ran a full-length portrait of him down the length of its front page Thursday, pointing out the site of each of the 12 injuries he's suffered since joining the NBA. Four have been to his left foot.

© Canwest News Service 2008