Gold Rush Fever

Spokesman for the Chinese sports ministry Zhang Haifeng said: "We do have a target, that is to rank among the top nations in the medals table.  We managed that by winning 32 gold medals in Athens and we hope to do better in Beijing."

But Zhang played down his country's chances of overtaking the Americans despite their home advantage and the heavy investment in training potential medals winners.

"The charm of elite sport is its uncertainty," he added. "It is very difficult to realise this target because our rivals are so strong.  But our athletes will follow the Olympic maxim of 'faster, higher, stronger' and will give their all to get as good a result as possible."

Vice sports minister Feng Jianzhong said he hoped the athletes would show "good moral standards" and added it was a matter of "the more, the better" in terms of how many medals they won.

"All our athletes and coaches in our sports community are well-prepared," he said. "We started early, we have been very attentive to details, our work is comprehensive and progress has been made."

Joseph Capousek, recently sacked as trainer of the Chinese kayak team, said the country runs a military-style sports machine that puts winning above all else.  The 62-year-old German citizen added that Chinese athletes were worked "like horses" in order to bring Olympic glory to China.

That claim is regularly denied by Chinese sports officials.

"It's the responsibility of Chinese athletes and coaches to strive for medals at the games," said Cui Dalin, deputy director of the State General Administration of Sport, earlier this year.  "But we had never thought of winning the most gold medals," he told state-run news agency Xinhua.

Mr Capousek, who took up his coaching job in China in 2005, says the Chinese are going all out to turn that prediction into reality.  And in order to achieve that dream, he said the country runs a sports programme that is set up "just like a military" system.

Mr Capousek said his kayaking athletes, aged from 16 to 30, were under tight control from morning to night.  They lined up to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner together, and no one was allowed to speak.  He said they had very little contact with the outside world, and officials frowned upon relationships between athletes.

These officials often came to lecture the athletes, said the coach - leaving the kayakers in no doubt what was expected of them.

"If officials came it was always, 'You must work more, you must do this, you are wrong, you are bad'," he said.

Mr Capousek acknowledges that every sportsman and woman wants to win, but says that in China only gold is acceptable.  The Chinese-language version of the coach's contract even stated that he had to deliver gold medals at the Beijing Olympics, he said.