Saville has to walk away from her dream

With only 150 metres remaining of the women's inaugural 20 kilometres walk, Australia's Jane Saville held a huge lead and must have been contemplating life as an Olympic champion. She was in the tunnel and within a few seconds there would be 100,000 Australians waiting to greet her.

Then suddenly an Italian official leapt out of the shadows and waved a red card in her face. She had been disqualified and was out of the race. She threw her arms in the air and screamed: "No, no, not me." He replied simply: "Yes." She broke down in tears and China's Wang Liping walked past to claim victory.

Saville had already been given two white warning cards and knew that her third "lifting" infraction - not maintaining contact with the ground - meant automatic disqualification. She retreated to a hill overlooking the stadium and did not enter it for half an hour.

The women walking with her in the final stages, China's Hongyu Liu and Italy's Elisabetta Perrone, had already been thrown out. Perrone, who had inherited the lead on Liu's disqualification, stopped and waved her arms angrily in the air, then set off again, causing confusion as she overtook Saville to go back into the lead before walking off the road.

Disqualifications are a common feature of walk events, especially in the final metres. In the men's 20km Mexico's Bernardo Segura completed a lap of honour after crossing first and was being filmed on television talking to his country's president on the phone when he learned he had been disqualified in the final strides.