China’s Olympic plan to topple America

BBC television reported recently - ­ in shocked tones - how the Chinese team came from nowhere at the World Cup rowing regatta in June to shame their British counterparts. Rowing was not an event for which the Chinese had any reputation, while the Brits are world class. What on earth was going on?

Well, the Beeb and other sceptical Western media had better get used to it. China has its heart set on topping the medals table in the upcoming Olympics. Most important, they aim to beat the United States, which for sporting China is the only nation worth defeating.

For the past seven years, China's communist authorities have been running an intensive training programme reminiscent of the Soviet Union's methods - and goal of global domination - during the Cold War era. Unprecedented military discipline, huge sporting budgets, state-of-the-art foreign technology and proven international coaches have all been incorporated into what the Chinese call 'Project 119'.

Launched in 2001, Project 119 was named after the number of gold medals then offered in track and field, swimming and other water-based events like rowing, in which China was traditionally weak. (The number of golds in those sports has since increased to 122, but the project name has stuck.)

It goes back to the 2000 Games in Sydney when China won just one gold in Project 119 disciplines. An opportunity was spotted: if China could improve in these areas, it might clean up overall. "The State General Sports Bureau put forward Project 119 with the aim of making big breakthroughs in those events," Cui Dalin, deputy director of the General Administration of Sport Swimming, told Newsweek magazine.

By the 2004 Athens Games, the Chinese upped their tally to four gold medals on the Project 119 list. That improvement could hardly be considered revolutionary, but Sports Illustrated now reckons that the fruits of Project 119 are ready to harvest, and that the host nation could snatch more than a dozen medals in shooting, rowing, cycling and sailing in Beijing. And the additional medals could prove critical in helping China overtake the US at the top of the table.

Pricewaterhouse Coopers has projected that the Chinese team of 639 Olympic athletes (more than double the 311 it sent to Sydney in 2000, and topping the US tally of 596 athletes this year) will pip the US in Beijing by a total of 88 medals to 87. American bookies currently have China as favourite to win both the overall and gold-medal counts.

But while China's old guard would like nothing more than to upstage the US, many younger and more worldly Chinese, not to mention highly paid foreign coaches, are starting to question a system in which sporting prodigies are drilled in elite state-run sports schools, all for the glory of the motherland, from as early as age six.

German kayaking coach Joseph Capousek, sacked as trainer of the Chinese team last month, angered his former employers by claiming they had worked his athletes "like horses".

"Sure, other nations are keen to win gold medals," Wei Hanfeng, editor of the Chinese edition of Sports Illustrated, told the Los Angeles Times. "But other governments don't control your private life, prevent you from dating or seeing your family, force you to live in a dorm or stop you being rewarded by sponsors." ·