BEIJING — If anybody feels a pang of jealousy over China's haul of Olympic gold medals, they need only pause to consider what the athletes went through to get them.

The only mother on China's team, Xian Dongmei, told reporters after she won her gold medal in judo that she had not seen her 18-month-old daughter in one year, monitoring the girl's growth only by Web cam. Another gold medalist, weightlifter Cao Lei, was kept in such seclusion that she wasn't told her mother was dying. She found out only after she had missed the funeral.

Chen Ruolin, a 15-year-old diver, was ordered to skip dinner for one year to keep her body sharp as a razor slicing into the water. The girl weighs 66 pounds.


Closely watched
"To achieve Olympic glory for the motherland is the sacred mission assigned by the Communist Party central," is how Chinese sports minister Liu Peng put it at the beginning of the games.

The contrast couldn't be greater than between the Chinese and U.S. athletes. In their post-match interviews, the Americans rambled on about their parents, siblings, pets, hobbies, repeatedly using the word "fun." Shawn Johnson, the 16-year-old gymnast, waxed enthusiastic about the classes she'll take when she returns to her public high school in West Des Moines, Iowa.

Chinese athletes generally don't have pets, hobbies, brothers or sisters (most are products of China's one-child policy).

While U.S. team members frequently hauled their parents to Beijing, most Chinese parents watched the games on television. Chinese athletes train as many as 10 hours a day, and even the children have only a few hours a day for academic instruction.

"You have no control over your own life. Coaches are with you all the time. People are always watching you, the doctors, even the chefs in the cafeteria. You have no choice but to train so as not to let the others down," gymnast Chen Yibing told Chinese reporters last week after winning a gold medal on the rings. He said he could count the amount of time he had spent with his parents "by hours ... very few hours."


Inspired by Soviets
The Chinese sports system was inspired by the Soviet Union. While many U.S. athletes have ambitious parents to nurture their talents, China's future champions are drafted as young children for state-run boarding schools. Scouts trawl the population of school children for potential champions, plucking out the extremely tall for basketball, the slim and double-jointed for diving.

"I wanted to be a ballet dancer, but they said pingpong was right for me," said Lu Lu, a 20-year-old player at the Xuanwu Sports Academy in Beijing.

After Beijing was chosen in 2001 to host this summer's games, China's sports authorities launched Project 119 (after the number of medals available in athletics, canoeing, sailing, rowing and swimming that were not Chinese strengths) and assigned promising young athletes to focus exclusively on these sports, some of which they had never heard of.