China's child-fuelled medal machine keeps cranking out Olympic gold

The only thing that matched the awesome speed of Chinese swimming star Ye Shiwen's bullet-like finish in the women's 400-metre individual medley last Saturday was the speed with which suspicion followed.Had the Chinese taken a page from the old, drug-tinged East German playbook?Was the 16-year-old swimmer on steroids?

Had Chinese trainers finally found a way around the International Olympic Committee's anti-doping tests?Chinese officials were enraged by the innuendo.The swimmer herself denied such suspicions, insisting that her gold-medal results “come from hard work and training.”And Ye would know something about that. China retains one of the most demanding and controversial training systems in the world, based almost entirely on the old Soviet Union model.

China was leading the medal count at the London Olympics after Wednesday, with 17 gold medals and 30 overall in the first five days of competition.Ye was plucked from a kindergarten class at the age of 6 in 2002 and has spent the last 10 years of her life in gruelling training sessions, in a system Britain's four-time Olympic gold medallist Matthew Pinsent has likened to child abuse.