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Olympic focus will not stop Doha gold rush(Reuters)Updated: 2006-11-28 09:32
China are unlikely to relinquish their 24-year grip on the top of the Asian Games medals table despite using Doha to give their younger athletes big-event experience ahead of the Beijing Olympics.
The huge investment in athletes for Beijing 2008 has produced a great depth of talent in Olympic sports and the relentless pursuit of gold is deeply ingrained in China's sports system. "There is no excuse not to win a gold medal at the Asian Games," Tom Maher, head coach of the defending champions women's basketball team, told a news conference earlier this month. Around two-thirds of the delegation have no previous experience of top-level international competition and big names such as Athens Olympic champions Xing Huina (10,000m) and swimmer Luo Xuejuan (100 breaststroke) are absent. There are, however, plenty of world-class performers and China's gymnasts, swimmers, divers and shooters will be looking to reproduce the dominance they achieved in 2002. Triple world champions Cheng Fei and Yang Wei are included in a gymnastics squad that features all but one of the team that won eight gold medals at the world championships in Aarhus last month. "We are competing for the gold medals in all the 14 events. At the Pusan Games we won 12. We can't do less than that," said head coach Huang Yubin. Men's world number two Ma Lin is in a table tennis squad that will be looking to increase its haul of three golds at Pusan, despite the absence of rested world number two Wang Liqin. The Chinese men drew a blank in the badminton in Pusan and world champion Lin Dan along with his team mates Chen Jin and Bao Chunlai will be anxious to rectify that.
A lot of the focus in China will be on how the men's basketball and soccer teams fare. Houston Rockets centre Yao Ming was given permission to skip the Games so NBA trailblazer Wang Zhizhi leads a team including top teenage prospect Yi Jianlian, who will carry the flag at the opening ceremony on Friday. Serbian Ratomir Dujkovic has his first chance to impress with the soccer team he took over last month although hopes are not high. "The foreign coach needs some time to acclimatise as well as the footballers. We just hope they do their best," Xiao Tian, vice-chief of the Games delegation, said. China's focus on Beijing 2008 has been so total over the last five years that, with a few exceptions, the sports which do not feature at Olympic Games will be their weakest. "We want to train our youngsters for the Olympics," Cui Dalin secretary-general of the delegation told a news conference earlier this month. "But we also care about the non-Olympic sports. "We are not good at those events, except wushu, but we are sending our best athletes, like snooker player Ding Junhui and our top wushu teams." |
