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."