Avoided critical behavior in dynamically forced wetting

A solid object can be coated by a nonwetting liquid since a receding contact line cannot exceed a critical speed. In this Letter we study the dynamical wetting transition at which a liquid film gets deposited by withdrawing a vertical plate out of a liquid reservoir. It has recently been predicted that this wetting transition is critical with diverging time scales and coincides with the disappearance of stationary menisci. We demonstrate experimentally and theoretically that the transition is due to the formation of a solitary wave, well below the critical point. As a consequence, relaxation times remain finite at threshold. The structure of the liquid deposited on the plate involves a capillary ridge that does not trivially match the Landau-Levich film.