刘翔在微博上问网友：单位让我选，拿钱走人，还是回来当教练？

Athens, twenty-two years ago: a twenty-one-year-old Chinese man stepped onto the track, ran 12.91, and won the gold.

Before that, no Asian had ever stood on the top step in the 110-metre hurdles.

His name is Liu Xiang.

What came afterwards, a lot of people remember too.

The year of Beijing, he walked to the starting line carrying an injury, and then withdrew. The whole stadium went quiet.

Four years later in London, he fell at the first hurdle, hopped the rest of the lane on one leg, and at the end kissed the last hurdle before the finish.

For a few years, the abuse was loud: people said he faked the fall, said he was a fraud.

Later he retired, married, divorced, spent a few years in the gossip pages, and then gradually nobody mentioned him at all.

This year he is forty-three, and he stopped running long ago.

Last week he asked a question online, and the question startled a lot of people.

He said his work unit had given him two choices, and he did not know which one he should take.

The first choice is called a seniority buyout.

The unit pays him a one-off sum; once he takes it, he and the unit are square, and he never comes in to work again.

The second choice is to stay on the establishment, come in to work as normal, and be a coach.

In China, those two characters — the establishment — carry real weight: they mean you are formally part of that unit, with a salary, a position, an identity, all the way to retirement.

He wrote both roads out online exactly as they were, and asked: what do you think I should choose?

The strange part is right there.

Liu Xiang does not need money.

Nike signed a lifetime contract with him, guaranteeing fourteen million a year.

Whether or not he comes in to work, whether or not he ever runs again, that money gets paid.

The buyout his unit is offering, set beside fourteen million, is almost negligible.

So what he is asking about is very likely not money.

The Shanghai Sports Bureau later responded that this follows the rules for placing retired athletes, and applies to everyone alike.

The wording was clear, thoroughly by the book, and impossible to fault.

But of the tens of thousands of replies underneath, not one was discussing the rules.

Some said: be a coach — you know that track better than anyone.

Some said: take the money and go, you have already given twenty years to this country.

Someone dug up the video from that day in Athens and wrote: the first time in my life I stayed up all night to watch a race, it was for you.

And some said: why are you asking us?

I think that last one is the question that actually hits the point.

Twenty-two years ago, he did not need to ask anyone.

He stood on the track, and when he finished, he had his answer — a number, written there, and nobody could change it.

That is the most comfortable thing about being an athlete: the answer the world gives you is fast and hard, and never vague.

Whether you are the best, 12.91 tells you. No vote required, and nobody has to nod.

Now, he sits in an office.

The two roads in front of him: take the money and walk away, or teach other people to run.

Both are respectable, both are secure, and neither of them is running.

So what he is really asking is very likely a different question.

When a man has given twenty years to one track, what identity is left to him after he leaves it?

He probably knows the internet cannot give him that answer.

But he asked anyway — and he asked in front of tens of millions of people.

Think about it:

After a person stops running, is he still an athlete?