Baby champs

Wrapped up against the cold in a bright red ski jacket, 11-year-old Wang Xuemei hurtles down an icy slope on her snowboard before losing her balance and tumbling in a cartwheel of limbs and powdery snow. Under the anxious gaze of her coach, she quickly picks herself up, dusts herself down and hurries off to the lift to prepare for another dizzying descent. It could be a scene from a ski resort for holidaymakers anywhere in the world - but for Xuemei, this is no winter holiday: it is an exercise she will repeat again and again, for five hours a day and for five months every winter until she perfects it. This is Yabuli in Heilongjiang province where - as the Turin Winter Olympics draw to a close - the mainland is nurturing a generation of future Olympians who sports officials hope will strike gold for the nation in four and eight years' time. Hundreds of young skiers and snowboarders hand-picked from around the country are taken away from their homes and schools to train six days a week in mountains near the border with the former Soviet Union, where temperatures can drop to minus 40 degrees Celsius. For five months of the year, their family is a community of China's best young winter athletes - the stars of tomorrow who the mainland hopes will bring glory to the nation in the 2010 and 2014 Winter Olympics. Meanwhile, in the provincial capital of Harbin - China's coldest major city - children as young as three are being drilled in figure skating six days a week in an attempt to emulate the heroics of 20-year-old Zhang Dan, who won a silver medal in Turin a fortnight ago despite a spectacular fall. Excitement over China's success in Turin has sparked nationwide interest and spurred officials on in their efforts to make the mainland a powerhouse not only in the summer Olympics, where it excels, but in the winter games too. A huge training programme for young athletes has been launched by China to coincide with its anticipated bid to stage the Winter Olympics in Harbin in 2014. About 200 million yuan is being invested in new facilities to make Yabuli the base for the prestigious event. But while a lavish Olympic village complex for foreign teams and a ski centre and chalet for wealthy weekenders are being built at the foot of the mountains in Yabuli, the training camp where the youngsters are based is functional and austere. More than 300 children aged eight upwards are training at Yabuli's National Winter Olympics Training Camp, a closely guarded complex of 1970s concrete buildings a kilometre or so further up the mountain from the tourist resort. The young athletes live in dormitories and shared rooms, and train on ski slopes and snowboarding runs for three hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon for six days a week. School lessons are held in the evenings to make sure the youngsters do not fall behind with their academic studies. Homesickness is a major problem for the athletes, many of whom have never before been away from their parents and homes. The training programme in Yabuli runs from November to March. 'I live 250km away and I have been here every winter for three years. I miss my home and my parents,' said 16-year-old snowboarder Chen Xu , a youth champion and one of the most outstanding performers in her field. As she hurries back to the snowboarding slopes, she adds: 'But my aim is to be a world champion. I want to bring glory to China and being away from home is the price we all have to pay if we want to achieve excellence.' Snowboarding - recently seen largely as a 'fun' sport in the west and only added to the Winter Olympics programme in 1998 - has proved one of the biggest hits in terms of audience interest at the Turin games and is treated with great seriousness in Yabuli. Coach Wang Yongtao said the gruelling training programme helped China breed a generation of potential Olympic snowboarders in just three years. 'I'm very confident that we will be the best in the world in a few years,' he said. 'Last summer, after winter training, we took our best athletes to Canada for a month and they could not believe we had only been running a snowboarding programme for three years. They said 'How can you be so good in so little time?'' he laughed. However, the intensity of the programme has a human cost. 'It is difficult for the youngsters to be away from home for so long. They get very homesick sometimes. I have to be not only a coach to these children but a father as well,' 40-year-old Mr Wang said. 'If they become champions, however, they will have a rich future - not only because of their medals but because the Chinese government will reward them for their success. It is something for them to aim for.' To prevent homesickness, youngsters at the training camp are encouraged not to phone home too often. One 13-year-old, who said he last saw his parents when he arrived at the camp in November, said: 'We are told that this is our family here. It is better that way, because we are away from home for such a long time, but it is hard because nearly all of our parents have only one child.' After an exhausting morning's training, skiers and snowboarders return to dorms where for the past fortnight they have been glued to television sets to watch daily highlights from Turin, where some graduates from the training programme are competing. Speed skier Xun Qinghai, 20, who has spent six winters at the camp and shares a 15 sq ft room with two other skiers, their beds side by side, said: 'We watch the Winter Olympics on TV every day. Zhang Dan is a friend of mine and we all want to be like her. She has brought great honour to our country.' Two hours south of Yabuli in Harbin, a city of almost 10 million people famed for its ice sculptures, an intensive government-subsidised programme is under way to train children in figure skating and ice dancing from the age of three. At the Harbin Skating Club complex, children are rigorously tutored six days a week for just 8 yuan a session by top coaches including Chen Xinjing, who 16 years ago gave the first skating lessons to Zhang, when she was just four years old. 'I'm very proud of what Zhang has achieved,' Mr Chen said. 'She is a hero for all of China. But I believe we have more future world champions among these young skaters. I believe we will have gold medals in years to come.' As more than 30 children skated in elaborately synchronised movements across the ice rink, Mr Chen picked out four-year-old Lin Zhilin, who began lessons just after her third birthday. 'She could be the next Zhang Dan,' he said. Zhilin's mother, Huang Xiaodong, beamed with pride as her pigtailed daughter pirouetted across the ice in front of her coach. 'I bring her here six days a week,' she said. 'She could skate almost as soon as she could walk. 'My little girl is very confident about her ability and she knows she will be a champion one day. She watches the famous ice dancers on television and she says to me: 'I can do better than that' - and I believe one day she will.'