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China's athletes have come a long way since 1952 when they appeared at the Helsinki Olympics. Then, the Chinese delegation, representing basketball, soccer and swimming, arrived late for the event and only one sportsman, a swimmer, managed to compete. He was eliminated in the heats.

This was a very far cry from the 2000 Sydney Olympics at which China finished third overall behind the United States and Russia with a tally of 59 medals, including 28 golds.

The climb to the top has taken China 50 long years and it has been an arduous road, sometimes made more difficult by the intrusion of politics.

After the fiasco at Helsinki, China stayed away from the Olympics because the International Olympic Committee (IOC) adopted a 'two-China' policy by also recognising Taiwan.

But in 1979, at an IOC meeting held in Nagoya, Japan, the executive board headed by then president Lord Killanin, passed a resolution that confirmed the People's Republic of China as representative of the Olympic movement in the whole of China. Taiwan was allowed to remain under the name of Chinese Taipei.

Three months later China sent 28 athletes to the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid in the US. Although they failed to win medals, the Chinese flag was raised at the Olympics for the first time in 28 years.

China did not, however, take part in the Summer Games held that year in Moscow, and had to wait until the Los Angeles Games of 1984 for the real breakthrough when shooter Xu Haifeng became China's first ever Olympic gold medallist.

Juan Antonio Samaranch, presiding at his first Olympic Games after succeeding Lord Killanin, presented the gold medal to Xu, saying it was 'a big day in China's 5,000 year history'.

That was the beginning of China's success at successive Olympics. The country went on to finish with 15 golds at Los Angeles, including three won by gymnastics star Li Ning.

Four years later, in Seoul, China won only five golds, but was back on track at Barcelona 1992, and Atlanta in 1996, winning 16 golds on both occasions.

Sport has been a guiding light ever since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. The country has to date won more than 80 Olympic gold medals at the Summer Games, and at present has more than five million young athletes in training.

Success is largely the result of the efforts of a gigantic state machine that identifies and nurtures talented youngsters.

The heart of the sports-nurturing body is the Beijing University of Physical Education, while there are 35 sports research institutes and 15 sports institutes dotted around the country. These combine to create a production-line for grooming dedicated athletes. To complement this, there are also 120 universities and colleges with physical education departments.

Before China introduced market reforms in the early '80s, its sports development was centred around table tennis. As a result, from 1949 to 1966, when China set up its first State Sports Commission, the nation won 13 world titles, mostly in the nation's favoured field.

After the Helsinki Games, the country's only international success continued to come from table tennis. But this sport did help China come in from the cold. Ping-pong diplomacy between Chairman Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon led to the resumption of ties between China and the United States. And in 1979, China was reinstated in the IOC.

Keeping pace with the country's accelerating economic programme, sports has been progressing steadily during the past two decades, when Chinese athletes started to dominate sports other than table tennis. Olympic victories have come in 11 sports, including shooting, gymnastics, athletics, weightlifting, women's volleyball, archery, swimming, diving, badminton, judo and, of course, table tennis.

At the 1984, 1992 and 1996 Summer Olympics, China came fourth in the gold medal tallies. In Sydney, it was third in both gold medal and overall standings.

Helsinki is now ancient history.



Fifty years of sweat and tears