Chinese Olympic champ Liu Xiang announces divorce

Liu Xiang, one of the best known athletes in China, got a divorce on Thursday after a nine-month marriage to actress Ge Tian.

Liu, who won the 110-meter hurdles at the 2004 Athens Olympics, told his fans through Sina Weibo, a Chinese equivalent to twitter, that incompatibility was the reason for the divorce.

"We ended the marriage today," Liu said. "We hope we can each have a better life from now on. We bless each other."

Liu married Ge last September after a four-month courtship following his retirement from athletics.

Many of Liu's fans were not optimistic of his marriage at that time, saying that Ge just wanted to enhance her popularity by walking down the aisle with the Olympic champion.

Ge was known for acting as a woman who made use of a grenade concealed in her crotch to kill Japanese soldiers in an anti-Japan TV drama in May.

Liu never commented when Ge's drama was descried as vulgar and later pulled off the air. The couple had been rarely seen together in public.

Two hours after Liu's announcement, there were over 100,000 comments on his weibo account, mostly showing support for the former national hero. But jokes about Ge's TV play also surged.

Just like Ge's drama, Liu's career is full of controversy. He won the 110m hurdles at the 2004 Olympics and bettered the world record to 12.88 seconds in Lausanne in July 2006. But after winning the world championship gold in Osaka, Japan, to become the first male hurdler to own Olympic and world title and the world record at the same time, his life started to be troubled with injuries and off-track factors.

In the first round heat in Beijing Games, Liu limped off the track with an aggravated Achilles tendon injury to the astonishment of a capacity Bird's Nest National Stadium.

Four years later, Liu's fate mysteriously repeated in a bad way in London Olympics, where he hopped on one foot to the finish line, kissed the hurdle and was wheel-chaired off the track.

Liu's team had been accused of concealing his injuries by Chinese netizens.

"Liu Xiang is an actor in a way," a Sina micro-blogger commented. "Wish he will return to the real world. The drama is over now." Endi