They are mocked as “skeletons” by their fellow oarsmen. Their sport has been disparaged as like basketball for short people. And they can look like size-zero waifs when they stand next to the mighty hulks of the rowing lake.

There is no glitz or glamour in being a lightweight rower, and certainly no chocolate cake or beer. “I doubt the public will ever acclaim a lightweight in the same way as the big boys,” Richard Chambers said. But perhaps he and his fellow oar-thin colleagues are about to enjoy their day in the sun.

They will deserve the attention because, as Chambers argues: “The heavyweights will hate me for saying it, but our sport is tougher.” It is a big call but he has evidence, starting with the need to hit a crew average of 70kg (11st), which requires discipline, sacrifice and an ability to say “no” to second helpings. Not easy when you are training as hard as the heavyweights and have to watch them stuff down as many cream cakes as they like.

With no weight differential, the crews are so tightly matched that the margins are tiny. “We're all so close that it comes down to who has done that extra yard in the gym, who has lifted the extra weights,” Chambers said. “That makes it ultra-competitive.” In the racing itself, that breeds a manic intensity. The crews can look kamikaze, hitting 38, 40 strokes a minute most of the way down the course.”

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You may not even have known that lightweight rowing was a discipline at the Olympics given that it was only introduced in 1996 and Great Britain have never been among the medals. That should all change in the next ten days. Chambers's four should be in medal contention, albeit behind the formidable Chinese, while arguably Great Britain's best hope of gold from the entire rowing squad is the lightweight double scullers of Zac Purchase and Mark Hunter, whose first heat is on Sunday at the Shunji lake on Beijing's outskirts.

Hunter used to be a heavyweight rower, weighing in at 12st 9lb, so he, in particular, is familiar with the practice of running around in several sweatshirts to lose the final ounces to hit the individual limit of 72.5kg (11st 6lb).

“It used to be a big problem,” he said. “When I first came down to the weight, it was extremely taxing. You'd be fighting cravings. And you would take weight off and then two days later you'd have put it all back.” Now his regulation is so precise that he knows that he will lose 0.8kg overnight as a matter of course. “It is all part of the performance,” he said. “If you eat a packet of biscuits, you have to give up something else.”

Stripped down, a lightweight's torso is a road map of protruding veins, and the dieting also affects their mood. “You can get bad-tempered and withdrawn,” Purchase said. “Obviously that can be a challenge within a crew. And for the girlfriends.” Five years ago, the lightweights were largely left to their own devices when it came to slimming. The millions of pounds poured into British rowing have allowed the squad to invest in specialist advice.

“There was still some mythology about it when I came in a few years ago,” Robin Williams, the coach, said. “There were horror stories about people going to sleep on the eve of a race in bin bags. But there are no effective short cuts like dehydration because you weigh in two hours before each race.”

Their body fat of about 5 per cent is equalled only by road cyclists. The percentages when it comes to medal prospects are considerably higher, although it remains to be seen whether the public will embrace the little men of the sport whose malnourished look belies their power.

“They call us skeletons and we call them big, fat teddy bears,” Hunter said of his heavyweight colleagues. “We've never had the same attention, but maybe that will change if we're among the medals.”