Liu Yan, 26, was paralyzed at a dance rehearsal before the Olympics. In China, her story has been suppressed.

By DAVID BARBOZA

BEIJING - Last August a 26-yearold dancer named Liu Yan was supposed to give the performance of her life at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

Considered China’s leading classical dancer, she had prepared a six-minute piece called“Silk Road,”which was to celebrate the rich cultural heritage along one of this country’s earliest trade routes.

But two weeks before the show, during a rehearsal at National Stadium in Beijing, she leapt toward a moving stage that malfunctioned, causing her to fall into a deep shaft and crash against a steel rod.

Unconscious, she was taken to a military hospital, where doctors performed emergency surgery for six hours.

Not long after, her family was told the terrible news: Ms. Liu had severely injured her vertebra and was paralyzed below the waist. It was unlikely that she would ever walk or dance again.

“Life is not that sweet or beautiful after an injury,”she said tearfully, during a recent interview.“You confront a lot of dilemmas and pain.”

Strangely, Ms. Liu’s story is barely known inside China because in August, fearing that the news would detract from Olympic celebrations, Beijing’s Olympic Committee asked witnesses and family members not to talk about the accident. Even today, China’s statecontrolled news media have not been given permission to tell the full story of what happened.

But a few weeks ago, Zhang Yimou, the acclaimed Chinese filmmaker and director of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, honored Ms. Liu (pronounced LEE-oh) at an awards dinner here, and proclaimed her a heroine. Ms. Liu smiled, brushed away a tear and told the audience:“Don’t be too sad for me. I’ll be strong.”

Most days she goes through physical therapy, exercising her lower torso with stretches, hoping the lower part of her body will somehow spring back to life.

But doctors say the chances of such a breakthrough are slim. The nerves that connect to her vertebra were severely damaged.

Ms. Liu’s journey to the stage began in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of North China, where her mother works as a doctor and her father as a judge.

In an interview last April, months before her injury, her parents talked of their daughter’s singular passion: classical Chinese dance, which traces back hundreds of years and has been influenced by martial arts, tai chi and Beijing opera.

“She was crazy for dance, even on rainy days,”her father, Liu Xueming, said while sipping tea at a Beijing tea house.“I’d ride her on the back of the motorcycle to class. And the teacher would be shocked to see us.”

At 10, he recalled, she was good enough to win admission to the middle school affiliated with the prestigious Beijing Dance Academy. She was enrolled at the academy by 18, earning praise for her emotional interpretations in Chinese classical dance dramas. At 23 she took the nation’s top dance honor, the Lotus prize, for an original dance depicting the life of a poor girl who suffers the loss of her true love during the late Qing Dynasty.

Zhang Jigang, deputy director of the Olympic opening ceremony, was so impressed by Ms. Liu’s ability that he pushed organizers to cast her on opening night of the Beijing Olympics.

“I thought,‘She is just the one for the moment; she is the right person to dance in front of the whole world,’”he said in a telephone interview recently.

Then, on a balmy night in late July, with about 10,000 onlookers in the stadium for a rehearsal of the four-hour extravaganza, she tumbled off the platform and into darkness.

She still does not understand what went wrong.“I’m the most cautious dancer,”she said afterward.“I never got hurt before.”

When rumors of her fall were leaked on the Internet days after the Olympic Games opened, China’s state-controlled media responded with a small online report saying she had been injured. The posting was accompanied by a photograph of Ms. Liu in a hospital bed, smiling and waving to the camera.

In the Chinese press she puts on a happy face and says she’s hopeful about the future. But in a series of interviews over the past eight months she admitted to feeling empty and even bitter.

She said she could not bear to watch the opening ceremony on television in August, when a substitute dancer performed.

But more recently Ms. Liu has been trying to put on a happy face. She has expressed no bitterness toward the government or the Olympic organizers. She recently joined the Communist Party and has begun to make public appearances. She now talks about studying to be a television broadcaster.

Now, her struggle to move beyond the recent past is starkly evident.

“From a dancer to a paralyzed person - it’s a bitter reality,”she once said while in the hospital.“I can’t take it. Before I could lift my legs to my head. And now my legs lie dead on the bed.”