Boasting nine Olympic champions among their 265-strong team, many pundits predict China will improve dramatically on its fifth place behind the United States, Russia, Cuba and Japan two years ago at Palma de Mallorca in Spain.

Li Furong, China's team manager, is confident his charges can produce the goods, particularly with the support of what organizers in Beijing say will be over three million spectators during the 12 days of action.

At the Sydney Olympics, the Chinese table tennis players swept all four titles at stake, their second Olympic feat in a row, and the divers won five out of seven gold medals. The Chinese won a total of 28 gold medals, placing third in the final medal tally.

China hopes to come out on top in the medal table as they have in the last four Asian Games.

Albeit the absence of two men's world table tennis grand slam winners (titles at the Olympics, the World Championships and World Cup) Kong Linghui and Liu Guoliang and women's Olympic and world champion Wang Nan, the Chinese can still easily sweep seven titles.

World No.1 Wang Liqin, this year's World Championships triple gold medallist, will spearhead the Chinese men in their quest for gold. The glory of his championships erased the cloud hanging over him as a big-time choker. With teammates paving the road to the winners' podium, Wang will surely not let the chance of adding another major world title to his belt slip through his hands.

Local Beijing player and women's No.2 world's holder Zhang Yining is still 19, but she has already shown her potential to replace Wang in the women's No.1 spot, after winning the Women's World Cup last week.

For table tennis, China's national past-time, a runner-up is equal to a defeat in the eyes of the fans.

And the Chinese officials know it. Li Furong, chef de mission of the Chinese Universiade Delegation and former world table tennis champion, said earlier last week that China is confident of sweeping all seven gold medals.

China's diving team is considered the Dream Team. From Zhou Jihong's first Olympics title at the Los Angeles Olympics, Chinese divers have been a source of pride for China's sports success in almost every major and small continental and international meet. At the 2000 Sydney Olympics and last month's World Swimming Championships, the divers won five gold medals each time.

No wonder world and Olympic champion Tian Liang has been chosen to light the cauldron at the Universiade.

Tian and his girlfriend and teammate Guo Jingjing are the backbone of the 13-member Chinese team as the Chinese divers prepare to make a big splash in the pool. The couple will definitely make the Universiade diving competition a world-class one, especially with the absence of top Russian divers.

Unlike the Olympics and the World Championships where there are only seven gold medals, the Beijing Universiade offers a dozen gold medals.

For both the men's and women's soccer teams, the Beijing Universiade might prove to be the event that allows them to win their maiden major world trophies and to please those die-hard fans whose hearts have been broken by recurrent failures, especially by the men.

The men's team has never reached the World Cup finals and their only Olympic appearance in 1988 was a whitewash in the first round. The women's team lost to the Unites States both in the Atlanta Olympics and the 1999 women's World Cup finals.

But the men's team, the Chinese national youth team, will miss several key players, including keeper An Qi and strikers Qu Bo and Du Wei, who are playing in the 2002 World Cup Asian Zone qualifiers. The overall strength of the team, which beat Argentina and lost to Brazil in a penalty shoot-out in a Hong Kong youth invitational earlier this year, remains formidable.

But also missing will be the head coach, Shen Xiangfu, who is helping Serb head coach Bora Milutinovic of the senior national team in the Cup qualifier.

The women's national team will not have the World Cup's best player Sun Wen, and Gao Hong and Wen Lirong, but the team should be good enough to win the title and make Chinese soccer officials and fans happy.

In most sports, the Chinese women are doing better than the men. The one exception, however, is the gymnastics events in which the men have won numerous world titles while the women are tailing the Russians and Romanians.

The situation will be the same at the Beijing Universiade. The men, led by world champion Li Xiaopeng, Xing Aowei and Yang Wei, will pocket most of the eight golds, while the women, spearheaded by Dong Fangxiao and Huang Mandan, will have to beat off strong challenges from the Europeans, including the Russians, Romanians and Belarussians, for medals of any color in six events.

Track and field, the event which offers the most medals in a comprehensive meet (except for the Asian Games), has been China's weakest sport in world competition. The Beijing Universiade is no exception.

Dogged by drug scandals, the former unbeatable Ma's Army, the Liaoning middle and long distance running team coached by Ma Junren, is now vulnerable. But Dong Yanmei, Edmonton World Championships women's 5,000-meter fourth-place finisher and Li Jinnan may eventually rise to the occasion in such a less competitive event.

The Chinese walkers, male and female, who either withdrew due to fatigue or were pulled off the track for fouls, should be able to fully take the home-court advantage and contribute to China's ambition of topping the medal tally when the Games end on September 1.

Sydney Olympic women's 10,000m walking champion Wang Liping will be out to prove that her gold medal was no fluke after the disqualification of the leading Russian walker. But Wang's teammate and China's No.1 woman sprinter Li Xuemei, whose awesome 10.79 seconds in the 100m in 1998 stunned the world, is not expected to participate.

On the basketball court, the "Walking Great Wall" trio of Wang Zhizhi of the Dallas Mavericks, Yao Ming and Menk Batere - who together propelled China onto the Asian championship throne in July - will have their work cut out to keep pace with perennial favorites the United States and the European powerhouse Yugoslavia.

The Americans, who have captured the last six consecutive Universiade gold medals in an amazing 40-game winning streak, boast Juan Dixon and Lonny Baxter - two of the country's most exciting college players.

And, with NBA legends Larry Bird, Karl Malone and Charles Barkley all having cut their teeth at previous Universiades, Team USA's head coach Jerry Dunn is determined that his 2001 recruits follow in their giant footsteps.

But unfortunately, China's explosive Luo Xuejuan, 16, fresh from her double breaststroke success at the world swimming championships last month, will not be creating waves in the pool due to the age limit.

(China Daily 08/22/2001)