Chinese face loss of Games colossus

FOR China, the Beijing Olympics without its most famous sportsman, Yao Ming, would be like the Sydney Games without Ian Thorpe.
But that is the grim possibility facing China after the 27-year-old was ruled out of the rest of the US basketball season with a stress fracture in his left foot.
Along with world record-holding hurdler Liu Xiang, Yao is the face of the Beijing Olympics. His portrait is plastered on billboards throughout the capital, and appears in continual television advertisements.
Yao, who has for several years topped the Forbes rich list of Chinese celebrities, earning $39million last year, epitomises the Chinese dream: he is rich, famous and lives in the US.
But Yao is considering the possibility he will miss his home Games. "If I cannot play in the Olympics for my country this time, that would be the biggest loss of my career," said the 230cm colossus.
The news broke in China mid-morning. By 3pm, a single website, sina.com, had registered 7.7 million posts from sports fans registering their anguish and declaring their support for the likeable Yao.
One lamented: "It's thunder in the sky! I'd rather my girlfriend leave me, my boss fire me, China fail to qualify for the soccer World Cup, even China to be robbed of hosting the Olympics, than Yao Ming to be too injured to play."
Many Chinese journalists are stationed in the US during the NBA season just to follow the fortunes of Yao Ming. Games in which he plays usually top the TV ratings in China. His wedding in Shanghai was the most widely reported event in the city last year.
He endorses dozens of products, including McDonald's, Pepsi, Reebok, Visa, Apple and giant mobile phone company China Unicom.
Yao said yesterday he and his doctors were still discussing how to treat the injury - "whether to put a cast on it or operate". In either case, healing would take three to four months and rehabilitation would begin only after that.
Yao's absence from the Beijing Games would be a huge blow for China's Communist Party. His birth was in many ways the culmination of a plan hatched by Shanghai sports officials to cultivate a generation of athletes who would embody the rising power of the communist nation.
More than 20 years before Yao was born, Mao Zedong ordered his followers to bring the most genetically gifted youngsters into the emerging communist sports machine so they could produce the next generation of superstars.
Shanghai basketball coaches paired Yao's father, Yao Zhiyuan, and his mother, Fang Fengdi, both basketballers. An official convinced them they could "make do" with each other, and that they had the Communist Party's stamp of approval to get together.
The pair married, and Yao Ming was born on September 12, 1980 - twice the size of the average Chinese newborn