Video: Liu Xiang breaks the world record | Liu Xiang wins gold at Athens

ALL that glisters is not gold for Chinese athletes aspiring to triumph at the Olympics this summer.

Take China’s top Olympian, 24-year-old Liu Xiang, the standard bearer for the nation’s hopes. Liu was chosen to receive the Olympic torch from the hands of President Hu Jintao in Tiananmen Square. He is the most lavishly rewarded Chinese athlete to come out of the 2004 Athens Games, where he won gold in the 110 metres hurdles.

A picture of health, he is the smiling face of Coca-Cola, Nike and several domestic brands. But Liu’s gross earnings, reputed to be £1.9m a year from advertising and sponsorship, are dwarfed by those of Yao Ming, the Chinese basketball star who plays in the United States and picked up £29.6m last year.

The reason is that Liu’s commercial career is run by officials at China’s Track and Field Association, which takes a percentage of his earnings to repay the state for its years of training.

The Shanghai native is portrayed as a self-sacrificing role model. Local sports reporters who have inquired about his private life have been told that he has no time for girlfriends in his rigorous schedule.

“Interviews with Liu Xiang and his parents are tightly controlled,” said one Shanghai reporter. “We have heard that his family are not happy with the financial deal, although they do not want to say anything.”

Lou Chaoyi, an official at the Track and Field Association, said: “The state cultivated Liu Xiang and so Liu Xiang’s property rights belong to the state; therefore we firmly oppose the commercialisation of Liu Xiang.

“Overcommercialisation will destroy him, so any advertisements or promotion must come through our management,” Lou told the Dong Fang Zhao Bao, a Shanghai daily newspaper.

Liu’s official handlers have not always shown a sure touch in marketing the image of their hero. A scandal broke out after they signed him up to promote Baisha, one of China’s biggest cigarette companies.

Although the advertisements did not show him with cigarettes, the association between a leading youth role model and a well-known tobacco brand prompted fierce criticism from health advocates, leading Beijing television to cancel the commercials and the company to scrap the campaign. “Actually, I myself do not smoke or drink,” Liu said afterwards.

The next generation of Chinese athletes is likely to chafe at the financial and personal restrictions that would-be Olympians have taken for granted since the Communist party first turned its hand to creating a national athletics machine.

All over China, an estimated 200,000 children are enrolled in junior sports academies run by the state and modelled on the Soviet sporting system, which take them at an early age and mould them through six to seven years of strict discipline to the exclusion of all else. Inside their gymnasiums, small boys and girls can be seen exercising from first light to dusk.

The Chinese media have estimated that the government spent more than £5.3m to create the athletics team that went to the Athens Games. Unofficially, Chinese sports journalists have calculated that each of the 32 gold medals won at Athens may have cost it more than £4m.

One dissenting newspaper in Shanxi province, an area which suffers from poverty, said that in the eyes of officials, gold medals seemed to be worth more than education.

The Shanxi Daily noted that many children were still unable to go to school because the local government did not have enough money to build them - even though it was spending heavily on its quota of the prestigious sport academies.

Conscious of criticism about the £20 billion price tag for the 2008 Beijing Games, the government has quietly abandoned its slogans extolling the amount of money committed to making them a success.

For those who fail to make the grade, the pressures of life in China’s highly competitive society can be unforgiving.

The case of Zou Chunlan, a female weightlifting champion who did not win a place on the Olympic team, caused a national stir when it was highlighted by the People’s Daily.

Zou was left without any skills to make a living after years in the hothouse of the sports academies, and was reduced to scrubbing customers’ backs in a bathhouse in Changchun, a drab northern city.

“Those who are not famous are forgotten by society,” the newspaper commented. The article prompted a wave of sympathy from individuals and sports associations, who raised money to help Zou start a laundry. They also paid for cosmetic surgery to restore her femininity after the weightlifting regime left her with strongly masculine characteristics.