With many medals awarded in rowing, China hired a former Soviet coach to strengthen its program.

By JULIET MACUR

QIANDAO LAKE, China - When Igor Grinko, a former Soviet coach with an impressive resume, agreed to take over the Chinese rowing team four years ago, Olympic officials outlined their expectations with a simple equation: one gold equals 1,000 silvers.
“Silver- It means nothing here; you might as well finish last,” Mr. Grinko said. In anticipation of China’s debut as an Olympic host, officials here have seized the opportunity to prove their country is a world power in sports. Rowing is at the heart of China’s plan to capture, for the first time, more gold medals than any other nation at the Olympic Games.
Mr. Grinko, 62, is the uncompromising leader of the magnificent $10 million government-financed athletic complex on the banks of what is called Thousand Island Lake, where he is known for his brutal training regimen. In the nine years before Mr. Grinko joined the United States team, his Soviet rowers won 14 Olympic and world championship medals, including eight gold.
China has won just four medals in rowing since its first Olympics in 1932. But suddenly, a t a World Cup regatta last year in Amsterdam, China stunned some teams by taking home 10 medals.
Some rivals say they became suspicious because the rowers had improved so fast. After Amsterdam, Mr. Grinko’s cellphone began ringing. “Your team must be doping,” he recalled former colleagues telling him.
Mike Teti, the coach of the United States men’s rowing team, said, We know they are cheating, but there’s nothing we can do about it.
But Cui Dalin, the vice minister of the General Administration of Sport of China, insisted that the host team would be “clean, very clean.”
Eight years ago, as China was vying to win its bid for the Olympics, officials like Mr. Cui began a government-financed effort called the 119 Project. Its purpose was to improve performances in the medal- heavy sports - track and field, swimming, rowing and sailing - in which the Chinese have been weak. The plan was named after the 119 gold medals awarded in those sports at that time.
“No secrets, no mysteries going on here,” Mr. Grinko said. “They’re just doing this like the East Germans did in the 1970s and ‘80s.”
When Mr. Grinko arrived here in 2004, practices were unproductive. He called the rowers “more like soldiers than athletes” and “slow, like elephants, but strong.”
Rowing is simple to learn, “not so difficult like gymnastics,” he said. He teaches better technique and improved efficiency.
Motivating athletes is harder.
“This is their work, and they have no choice but to stay,” he said. “This is not their passion. It is just a business.”
Gao Yulan, 25, began training full time when she was 13, leaving her parents, who are vegetable farmers in Jiangxi Province.
“When I was young, this was a very difficult life, but you learn to adjust,” said Ms. Gao, an Olympic favorite in the women’s pair. “Everybody has to work. This is just my job.”
Through an interpreter, Ms. Gao said she dreamed of becoming a fashion designer wearing high-heeled boots with hot pants and a spaghetti-strapped top. Asked about her motivation to train, she bit her lip.
“For fame, reputation and honor?” she said. As the interpreter spoke, Ms. Gao glanced at Mr. Grinko, who nodded in approval.
Historically, no sporting event was more important in China than the National Games, where teams from the 23 provinces compete every four years. A gold medal can lead to a car, a furnished apartment and elevated social status for athletes and their families.
The Fujian provincial coach, Sean Hall, a former American Olympian, said that mentality was the major obstacle to the Chinese quest to win more Olympic gold.
“The biggest problem with a rower going to train with the national team was that they didn’t get extra money for it,” Mr. Hall said.
Chinese officials devised an award system whereby every Olympic gold medalist at the 2004 Athens Games would get an extra gold at the next year’s National Games. For Beijing, two extra National golds will be awarded to the athlete’s province for every Olympic gold won.
Mr. Hall said the provinces were finally coming around. “In America, the athletes aren’t automatons, saying, ‘We want money, we want money,’ ” he said. “But you can kind of understand it. Here, it falls on a kid’s shoulders to support the parents. When the parents are dirt poor, hungry, working on a farm or in a factory, can you imagine what the pressure is like to do well?”
A series of doping scandals have scarred China’s sport system. More than 30 swimmers failed drug tests at international events in the 1990s. China kept seven rowers, including the current Olympian Zhang Xiuyun, home from the 2000 Sydney Games after their blood tests indicated use of the blood booster EPO, officials said.
It is still a sore point. In 2004, China passed an antidoping law and later increased testing of athletes who would benefit most from performance-enhancing drugs. Sports programs will be held accountable, Mr. Cui said. If two or more athletes in a sport fail drug tests, that sport will be eliminated from next year’s National Games.
Mr. Grinko said he had been warned that anyone involved in doping would be sent to prison. His rowers say they are clean.
But others wonder about the past.
Pan Yuenan, a former rower who translates for Mr. Hall, said she and her Fujian teammates were given intravenous drugs before the 2005 National Games. The label on the IV bag “said it would build muscle fiber, that it would make our muscles longer,” Ms. Pan said.
“We asked the doctor to tell us more about it, but he did not,’’ she added in English. “I trusted him.”
Last spring, Chinese officials barred several rowers from a World Cup event because of abnormal blood tests. Mr. Grinko blamed the province teams and subsequently stopped his rowers from receiving packages from them.
But nothing, he said, will stop his team from victory in Beijing.
“I am told China must show a good face at the Olympics,” Grinko said. “No doping, just gold medals.”