Leotards for gymnastics

From the outside, Beijing's Shishahai sports school is unremarkable. It would be easy to walk past it, a functional-looking building a couple of miles north of Tiananmen square, without even noticing. Inside the main entrance, in the gloomy hall, the first thing you see is the noticeboard, on to which the pictures of five athletes have been pinned. The five, former pupils of the school, were all at the Olympic games in Athens this summer. One of them, Zhang Nan, came back with a bronze medal. The others - Luo Wei, Zhang Yining, Feng Kun and Teng Haibin - won gold. One school, three individual and two team gold medals. as Olympic sport is concerned, that makes the Shishahai Sports School more successful than Canada.

In the school's huge gymnastics hall, dozens of tiny children wearing leotards or just their underwear are balancing on beams, cartwheeling across the floor, hanging from rings and swinging from asymmetric bars. Officially, the youngest are five, but some look younger. If they fall off something, they are picked up by one of the many coaches and put back on. Everything is done again, and again, and again - until it is done right. They look neither happy nor unhappy. All are perfectly behaved, and it is eerily quiet. It's an extraordinary place, this gymnasium, an enormous room full of tiny, muscular little children, quietly being turned into gymnasts.

Three Chinese gymnasts won medals in Athens, not an especially proud tally for the country. But two of the three - Teng Haibin, who got gold in the men's pommel horse, and Zhang Nan, who was women's individual all-round bronze medal winner - started off in this room.

Along a corridor, out through the yard, and into another nondescript building is the table-tennis hall, where dozens more children, older this time (the youngest is eight), hit balls to each other on rows and rows of tables. It's not quiet in here. In fact the noise is almost deafening - a ping-pong percussion symphony played on rubber bat and plastic ball, the harsher knock of ball on table, the squeak of trainer sole on wooden floor, with a melody of yelling kids on top. Given the echoing acoustics of the place, it sounds a bit like hell

China has always led the world in table tennis and won six medals in Athens. Zhang Yining, who won gold in the women's singles and doubles, first put bat to ball in this room.

There are similar scenes all round the school. Huge rooms, each with a giant Chinese flag hanging across one end, filled with obedient kids learning champions of the future - in volleyball, weightlifting, boxing, badminton and martial arts. It's a tough regime for the school's 550 pupils, aged between five and 16, and all of whom are boarders. They get seven in and exercise for half an hour before breakfast. Then they do school work. After lunch, it's physical training from two to five. Then they shower, eat and do their homework before going to bed. They can go home on Saturdays for one night with their families, and the very youngest are allowed midweek visits by their parents, too.