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 stood on the track.

That day he ran 12.91, and won the gold.

Before that, no Asian had ever won the 110-metre hurdles.

His name is Liu Xiang.

What came afterwards, a lot of people remember too.

The year of Beijing, he was injured. He walked to the starting line, and then withdrew.

Four years later in London, he fell at the very first hurdle and hopped the rest of the way on one leg.

For a few years after that, an enormous number of people cursed him.

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 to take.

The first choice is called a seniority buyout.

The unit pays him a one-off sum; once he takes it, his tie to the unit is finished, and he never comes in again.

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

In China, being on the establishment means you are formally part of that unit: a salary, a position, all the way to retirement.

He wrote the two roads out online and asked: what do you think I should choose?

Here is the strange part.

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 is there.

The sum his unit is offering, next to fourteen million, is nothing.

So what he is asking about is very probably 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, and thoroughly by the book.

But not one of the replies underneath was about 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 this country twenty years.

Someone dug up the video from that day in Athens and wrote: the first time I ever 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 hits the point.

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

He stood on the track, and when he finished, he had his answer — a number, 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.

Now he sits in an office, and the two roads in front of him are: take the money and leave, 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 probably a different question.

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

Think about it:

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